[Wolves] Need some help!

[Adam Sweet]

Hi Helen and welcome :)

Well the chances are that most of the usual stuff
people do on computers will be covered by pretty much
every main Linux distribution. So office sotfware,
email, web browsing, MP3 playback and cheesy games are
all more than well catered for.

For ease of use I would suggest Mandrake, Red Hat or
SuSE. Alternatively try Xandros which is said to be
very easy to use. You can download of all them from
from their respective websites, though I found SuSE a
little difficult to download as a CD image. Basically
download the CD isos and burn them to CD, or get
someone to do it for you. You can of course buy the
CDs pre-boxed accompanied by various manuals and
stuff, or just buy the CDs from online CD vendors like
http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk or
http://www.cheeplinux.co.uk

If you can, I would just go download the isos and burn
them yourself using any OS and burning software
(everybody needs scaffolding at some point ;)

My own suggestion would be Mandrake a it's very easy
to install and holds your hand all the way. Mandrake
also do some very good introductory online manuals,
which are useful whatever distro you choose. They are
at http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/fdoc.php3 if you
want to see what you're letting yourself in for and
get some knowledge on board before you start as the
learning curve can be steep if you don't have the
foundation knowledge.

Points to note:

Red Hat will struggle with less than 128MB of RAM (as
people on this list will testify and I think many
modern distributions will struggle with less than say,
96MB.

If you don't feel confident with disk partitioning and
don't have another hard disk (assuming you will be
running Windows on your exisiting disk), it might be
easier to just get another hard disk to put Linux on.
Mandrake's partitioning tools allows you to resize
partitions non-destructively, though I am always wary
of such things.

You've heard that some internal modems don't work with
Linux right? If not, this is because part of the
hardware of a modem is replaced by special drivers
that allow it to replicate the functionality in
software. Most vendors only create Windows drivers and
won't release technical details.

If you download Mandrake it might be worth you holding
fire a short while as version 9.2 is just around the
corner.

In my opinion I would download Mandrake and burn it
yourself if you have a burner and a fast internet
connection, buy it from an online CD vendor, or come
to a LUG meeting and ask nicely if someone will bring
you the disks in exchange for blank CD-Rs (we are nice
people after all). If you really want a box set, I'd
say SuSE.

Welcome to the LUG and good luck :)

Adam

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http://www.drinky.org.uk

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Use Linux. Because it's better.

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