[Wylug-help] Which Version of Linux?

[david powell]

On Sunday 23 October 2005 9:35 pm, Stuart Taylor wrote:
> After much hair pulling over windows I've decided to have a go with
> Linux. Ican't seem to make my mind up over the various distributions
> available though. I've narrowed it down to SuSe, Mandriva, Fedora or
> Knoppix, but I've no idea how they compare or ease of use.
> I'm an 
> absolute beginner to Linux (although no stranger to comuters and command
> prompts don't scare me) and it's only for a home machine. I would like to
> keep Windows XP on the machine as well so if any of the above don't work
> well with dual boot can you let me know ( i've already got a nice empty
> hard drive just waiting for the install).
> Cheers 
> Stuart

well knoppix is a live distro so you boot it from the cd and it runs from the 
cd 
you can install it to the hard drive or give it hard drive space to use 
personaly i find its a good distro to have for an emergancy boot 

suse is a good distro , its got all the apps and its easy to install 
its a good distro for beginners as its easy to use installing apps with yast2 
is easy enough in most cases , and theres a good forum forum and irc chat 
channels for help with it 
www.suseforums.net
and on irc  on irc.freenode.org  chans  #suse and #suseforums

suse has some querks but thay are minor , like some directories are in 
diferent places to other distros 

i would recomend suse from those you mentioned
another distro you havent mentioned is ubuntu i have herd good reports on that 
but not used it myself so cannot comment and that is avalable as a free 
download 

i know you havent mentioned it but beeing a beginner i would not recomend 
gentoo , it may be a good distro but you need to know what your doing to get 
it working correctly 

btw i have tryed a number of distros over the years but have genaraly stuck 
with suse since version 6.0 

well another thing to remeber , the first time you have a go whatever disto 
you install  your going to endup reinstalling it a number of times in the 
first few months , untill you dont break it or mess it up , and find out how 
to correct a change that you made, 
good news is suse takes less than 2 hrs to install from scratch 

going to give you a few pointers here before you install it , could save you 
time later

if you want to have the machine dual boot windows and linux , 
install windows first ,partition the drive  allocating the required partition 
space for it
then linux , otherwise when you install windows it will wipe the boot loader 
and you wont be able to start linux without creating another loader 
(the easyest way to recover from this for a beginer is to reinstall linux) 

if you want to be able to read and write to the windows drive in linux then DO 
NOT  format the windows drive as NTFS   use fat16 or fat32
if you have no option then split the drive futher and make a fat32 partition 
as drive D: in windows  use this for files that you want to be able to access 
in windows and linux 

it may take a few attempts to get it to dual boot correctly , but its just 
figureing out the correct settings 

if you get problems getting dual boot working then install linux and let it 
create a boot floppy with lilo , then install xp , to boot xp just turn on 
and to boot linux turn on and insert floppy ,

do remeber to back up any files you may need before starting , and be prepared 
to reinstall everything untill you figure it out 

sounds bad , well no , its worth it in the end 
 

Dave