Whats a good beginning Linux?

[Shyguy]

Hey guys, I was wondering what distro of linux is good for beginners, I have drake 9.0 but want a good one to learn with on my "new" laptop, I have to see about getting a bigger HD for it down the road, but for now I just need... WANT to get a small version thats easy to learn & use but takes up little space, as I only have 3 gigs to work with not including the space Win98 will take up, plus the spec of the notebook are a PII 233, 64MB PC66, & 2MB 64/128bit video, so it ca't have any "high" system req, not that most linux's do or anything, but to give an idea of what I have to help figure out what is best, so any suggestions would be appreciated!!!

[Cowboybooter]

Take a look through this (http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5833) thread, shyguy!

:)

Bob

[mickwish]

My suggestion would be to look at Peanut Linux (http://www.ibiblio.org/peanut/). Small, easy to use, and a good starter distro, IMO. :cool:

Cheers
Mick

[davidw]

I like Knoppix and RedHat 9 myself.

[Foggy]

A good place to find what you want.

http://www.distrowatch.com/index.php

[Crouse]

If your familiar with drake and want to cut your teeth on something slightly more difficult, try slackware..... it doesn't fill up your hard drive, and isn't as hard as debian or gentoo.

[LordKwiKSilva00]

i would say drake is the easiest to learn...i am just startin to learn nix myself, but i know drake pretty well for a beginner :p

[Shyguy]

Yeah I already got drake 9.0, but have been messing with MandrakeMove alot lately, probably best to play with as all you have to do is load teh boot CD into the drive, set the bios to boot from CD, then go at it, when done just powerdown the system, it automatically eject cd for you, reset option in bios & you can go back into windows or whatever. I actually prefer Mandrake for general Internet Use, & will probably switch over for that & E-mail, when I get the main rig up & running again, & just use Windows XP for gaming or other stuff I can't do on Linux.

Just got to learn linux's commands & stuff, its like using old DOS & old Windows, forgotten a lot of that, have been spoiled with 95, 98, ME, XP etc!:D

[Sh1Ft]

currently i have redhat slackware mandrake peanut knoppix and SuSE, Havent used any yet, planing on Mandrake

[darkomni]

Heh IMO you should just get like mandrake 10 and experiment on a partition. Although make sure if u have windows on that same computer u back it up incase you mess it up. If you play with it for a week or two you'll get good at it pretty fast. The only commands i have ever had to use are the sy command which makes u the super user, and the compiler commands. And if u can figure out how to do sumthing, just google it, ud be surprised how many answers u can find because of the wide usage of linux. Enjoy.

p.s. my recommandations incase you try to do a dual boot system is make linux the booter by installing the booter in the mandrake install in the MBR which will make it so linux controls the start up. Then set it up so it can load windows too. I managed this with mandrake 9,2 pretty easily so in 10.0 i think it might be a feature of the installer.

[axel_2078]

I would recommend Simply Mepis 2004. I've used both Mandrake 10.0 and Mepis and like Mepis 2004 much better. Mepis is more newbie friendly, has better hardware detection and driver support, and is much easier to set up for wireless devices. Give it a try and see what you think. :)