Which Linux for a newbie?

Which Linux for a newbie?

Hey all....been reading all day till the ol'e eyes are bleedin in their sockets...still have no idea if as a newbie I should use Red Hats "Fedora" or Novell's "Suse"10.1" or ummmm unaauba or whatevewr it is called.....I am sick of windows and all its bullcrap and want to change, but dont want to become a programer.......can anyone help?,,,,anyone in the Phoenix area wanna give me a hand?

The difference with Ubuntu is that they'll mail you a CD (though of 6.06) for free. How many others will do that?

For the low price 9.99 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000G62IDU/sr=1-1/qid=1153933657/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=software&tag2=ubuntushipit-20 you can get the new version. Or wait 6-10 weeks for the free 6.06.

I would say the free CD only would begin to make sense if you have a very low dial-up and have like zero money. Otherwise, go to http://www.osdisc.com/ and pay the 1.95 When you're there, you'll want to get PC-BSD, though.

Ubuntu of course!

Don't listen to all the twats talking about archaic distros like Mandriva, Fedora etc...

Go with standard Ubuntu which has a larger userbase(personal desktop) than all the other distros combined!

If you're a newbie you want as little resistance as possible and that's what Ubuntu gives you.

2 new questions:

1. If Kubuntu is supposed to be better than Ubuntu, why do people still stick with Ubuntu? (Note that I don't know what KDE and Gnome difference are)

2. With Linux Mint out, am I better off trying that first than Ubuntu?

Originally posted by Trailing:

2 new questions:

1. If Kubuntu is supposed to be better than Ubuntu, why do people still stick with Ubuntu? (Note that I don't know what KDE and Gnome difference are)
2. With Linux Mint out, am I better off trying that first than Ubuntu?

1. Some people are just anti-kde because it uses Qt as a toolkit (like Opera does too) and admittedly Ubuntu is still a little more polished than Kubuntu but yesterday I tried egdy and it's already a lot better than dapper

2. just try both

Now I can fully recommend MEPIS, they just added Opera to their repo, installing it as just easy as:
apt-get update && apt-get install opera (or through synaptic or kpackage, whatever way you prefer)

I'm trying now Mepis Beta 3 for 32 and 64 bit and it looks like it's going to be the best Mepis release yet (and I'm using it almost since it started as a distro).

Opera on 64 bit Mepis works without major issues, I have to figure out how to make spelling work, I tried installing 64 bit aspell but that depends on other stuff so I'm still looking for a solution for that, otherwise I'm sold for 64 bit.

Originally posted by KLICED:

If I found FTP upload space I would suggest checking out KLICED Linux, my distribution based on PCLinuxOS and its repositories:
http://my.opera.com/KLICED/blog/

After battling for an FTP upload for quite a while, I found a way out. If you know German you might check it out: http://www.pclinuxos.de/kliced/KLICED-DE-01-2007-mini.iso
Info: http://www.pclinuxos.de/smf/index.php?board=37.0

Originally posted by Sanguinemoon:

Originally posted by ICQ_Eagle:

Dial-up with 56k modems might be a major problem though, because most of these are WIN-modems.

Isn't there a way around that now?

WIN-Modems are designed for Windows...I doubt there will ever be a way around it. You do get 56K modems that are linux compatible though.

Also, related to the thread. We cannot tell you which flavor of ice cream (distro) you would like....You will have to try them out and decide for yourself. Personally I like Ubuntu...and slackware derivatives but some like SuSE and red hat etc..

use vector linux soho.

Why not Linspire?

Debian based Linux distro, it's free, you can download software for free from the CNR Warehouse, forum support, really easy to use GUI based thingy

Been using it now for four years I guess and I'm no techy!

Definitely try the LiveCD approach to ensure there are no hardware problems. Check out the forum for friendliness and helpfullness and the #irc

sidux is where I've ended up. Fabtastic distro and community

Definately OpenSuSE 10.2
KDE desktop
Beryl

Be happy

I was say use LinuxMint would be a good one for newbies to try. It's based on Ubuntu 6.10, but not fugly brown, instead it has a sense of style. Mintconf is a very nice replacement for the Gnome control center, Mintmenu is a much nicer menu than Gnome itself provides, codecs installed by default.

Or you can just try Debian Sid with the network installer, of course

Ok this is what i've found. These OSs/distro's are available for download as a single-CD iso that will run live (reboot straight into it, ready to go) AND you can then choose to install it to your HDD from the same CD if you want to - more than you can get from Windows!

DesktopBSD 1.6
Mandriva One
Ubuntu - and related distros kubuntu, edbuntu, xubuntu
Vector Linux

Did I miss any? I note all of them you can also order the CD.

I haven't mentioned other distros such as opensuse and pc-bsd because they seem to come only as multi-CD or DVD installs. I figure if you can't fit the essentials on a single CD then it's going to be a bit heavy anyway.

Haven't tried any yet. Downloaded two last night and I'm going to give them both a go. Thanks to those who contributed to this topic by pointing me to these. I might start a new topic once I've given them a test drive.

Originally posted by james.faction:

Did I miss any? I note all of them you can also order the CD.

I certainly would have included Mepis and PCLinuxOS.

Not Mepis. Mepis kept loosing the network setting that I configurated and defaulted to DHCP after reboot. For that reason, I would not recommend Mepis.

righto. I would have added PCLinuxOS to my list but I couldn't find anywhere to download an iso for a combination live/install CD. If you can point me to one I'll be happy to try it out!

Links for individual releases are generally posted in the PCLinuxOS forums.

Just looked at their website for my other post, they say their forum servers may be down due to load ...

There must be 100 installable LiveCD versions. I, too, wasn't impressed by Mepis. Knoppix has always been good, though the installer was somewhat questionable. I hear some good things about Slax (a LiveCD based on Slackware), but have never tried it myself. If someone has older hardware, Puppy is good on slower equipment.

Originally posted by sgunhouse:

There must be 100 installable LiveCD versions.

If you can recommend any others to try I will add them to the list. Keep in mind I'm only going to try the ones which are easy to install and use.

I've started a blog about it.

That's most of them, except distros like Slackware This might seem like a strange suggestion, but visit the websites of the various distro, read through their forums to also get an idea of the community (are they friendly, helpful, or elitist and unhelpful? Do they seem reasonably knowledgeable ) and pick the one that you get the best feeling about. I would just steer new Linux away from distros like Slackware and Gentoo, the rest are equally ease to use. If you go with Ubuntu, you might want to wait untill tomorrow though, that's when the new version comes out.

Good point - you will inevitably want to be able to go somewhere and ask questions, and meet with like minds, so checking out their forums and make sure their not a bunch of ****ers would be a good idea...

Sorry I didn't catch why you wanted to steer users away from Slackware and Gentoo?

Well ... this looks like a reasonable list. Though as it doesn't list Mandriva One as "OS Replacement" (the term they list for things which are supposed to be installable), it needs some updating yet.

The list includes some things which are not useful to you - stuff for security, forensic or rescue use, for example. If we limit it to "Desktop" (they have a convenient dropdown there to filter the list) then there are 148 there. "OS Replacement" only gives 28, but as I said I know there are more. Recommend? I've only tried around a dozen of them (from CDs or DVDs that come with magazines, mostly), I have no clue on the others.

Oh, should be obvious but ... anything listed as having a size larger than 800 has to be a DVD. And some older CD burners don't support anything over 700 MB, that's why Mandriva currently restricts theirs to at most 700. Some are available in several sizes, they may have both a CD and DVD version.

Originally posted by james.faction:

Good point - you will inevitably want to be able to go somewhere and ask questions, and meet with like minds, so checking out their forums and make sure their not a bunch of ****ers would be a good idea...

Sorry I didn't catch why you wanted to steer users away from Slackware and Gentoo?

Slackware is the oldest distro still in existence and it is a bit harder. The package manager I don't think automatically resolves dependencies like .debs and Gentoo I think you have to compile everything, which can be a pain. Those might not be the best to start with

Originally posted by sgunhouse:

Well ... this looks like a reasonable list. Though as it doesn't list Mandriva One as "OS Replacement" (the term they list for things which are supposed to be installable), it needs some updating yet.

Slax and Kanotix certainly get a lot of votes...

Maybe I can give a newbie's perspective.

My first encounter with Linux was the Puppy (cute little thing! I still love puppy) about a year ago. I was still on a slow dialup then so looking for something I can download in one day! to play with. I want to say I liked Puppy. Desktop/window management was quite different from WinXP but still intuitive and not hard to find my way in. However I was disappointed that the little dog could not detect my dialup modem. I tried to download driver from the manufacturer (with Win) and install without success. So no Internet. Also I have a rather peculiar requirement for multilingual capabilities. I need to be able to read and type Japanese. Unfortunately you can't expect a puppy to speak two languages when the majority of humans can't.

October last year, I made a trip to see my parents. My father had a very fast cable connection, and I was able to acquire a range of distros. When I got back home, I had Knoppix (ja version), Simply Mepis (en), Fedora Core (en and ja), and ubuntu (en) Only Mepis was able to detect the dialup modem, but hopeless with setting up Japanese. There was no provision to install a second language. I followed the instructions I found on the web that is supposed to be enable Japanese, but everytime I tried different methods, it broke and I, not knowing any better, had to reinstall. Knoppix (ja) produced some Japanese characters, but the wrong ones, due to my using English keyboard, and Knoppix would not understand how one wants to type japanese but not using a japanese keyboard. It could not detect my modem, either, nor did Fedora. And my effort to add japanese as a second language to Fedora produced the same effect as in Knoppix (j). Ubuntu was worse. I couldn't find on its desktop any menu item for configuring dialup modem! So I didn't bother going beyond trying its liveCD environment.

FF to February. I finally took a dive and installed a cable connection. Now Internet connection is not an issue. I went to distrowatch and looked up for distros that offer multilingual support. OpenSUSE was another major distro that offered multilingual support, but needed 5 CDs to install. (Wasn't only the method, there was online install. But I wanted to have it on CDs as I might need reinstall) I have monthly bandwith quota of 5Gb, so downloading SUSE requires a bit of planning. I also tried again Ubuntu, (and xubuntu!) as well as Dream Linux (created by a Japanese!) but the issue with keyboard was still there. I became quite busy and also disheartend by my experience with other distros. So I put off trying SUSE for a while, as it could not be tried as liveCD, but had to be installed properly.

Finally, the work front got a little quiet and I felt like giving SUSE a go. Install went smoothly. Gnome desktop looked sort of OK. Had a few go at using this YaST thing, and managed to install japanese as second language environment. Configured input engine control called scim. Not doing anything! This one's no good, too? Hang on. I read somewhere someone had a success with a KDE version of scim called skim. Maybe I need to install KDE. Being a newbie and not sure what I was doing, I reformatted the second drive and installed SUSE again. I installed Japanese and configured skim. Restarted skim. No luck. Wait. I should probably restart. Try again and a mini toolbar with teh name of imput engine popped up! Maybe, just maybe this time. I started word processor, and, I was typing Japanese!! Yeah!

That was Sunday. Since then I had a few more glitches (both my fault for trying to remove japanese UI support while keeping Japanese input, which broke the system, and trying to remove Firefox, which is apparently a part of SUSE KDE environment and I ended up removing most of KDE!) and had to reinstall SUSE two more times. But every time it becase easier and I felt like I'm finding my way around, only a very little more. I found SUSE and using its YaST for most of maintenance definitely newbie/user friendly and left less room for making fatal mistakes. I'm grateful with SUSE for understanding meeting the needs for bi-/multilingual work environment. I'll certainly keep SUSE on my second drive for a while and experiment with, though I haven't tried printing yet, which may be interesting. Also I want to try WINE, but my first attempt was failed miserably at the first stage of getting it to start. I'm getting busy again with work, so will get back to it later. Got to go. Grey's Anatomy will start in few minutes.

After giving it a good test drive, I'd definitely recommend Knoppix.

Knoppix has a really good keyboard chooser as well, sitting next to the clock on the right. It just looks like a flag - did you miss that?

That's fairly standard in KDE, if you enable it.

yeah it's just that it's turned on by default in in knoppix - and kanotix. I only mentioned it because mimi_s_mum here was having trouble with setting her keyboard, she may not have realised the flag icon next to the clock is how you do it.

Originally posted by N80:

Ubuntu of course!

Don't listen to all the twats talking about archaic distros like Mandriva, Fedora etc...

Go with standard Ubuntu which has a larger userbase(personal desktop) than all the other distros combined!

If you're a newbie you want as little resistance as possible and that's what Ubuntu gives you.

If the size of the userbase is what counts, you should probably stick to Windows.

I try each new Ubuntu release after it comes out, and I always start out very impressed, and then I always wind up wiping my hard drive in frustration. When I installed Feisty Fawn, I wound up with my X server breaking down for no apparent reason. Ubuntu is definitely not a fad, but it's a relatively new distro that makes rasical changes to the guts of the sytem, and that's bound to cause difficulties for some of the people who try to use it.

I've had my best experineces with SUSE and Debian, two very distinguished distros with a very long history, but other people have had problems with those. In these cases, it may be impossible to determine whether the problem lies with the hardware, the software, or the idiot at the keyboard, but what does it matter?

Ubuntu is as good a place to start as anywhere, and if that doesn't work for you, try something else.

Originally posted by N80:

Ubuntu of course!

Don't listen to all the twats talking about archaic distros like Mandriva, Fedora etc...

Go with standard Ubuntu which has a larger userbase(personal desktop) than all the other distros combined!

If you're a newbie you want as little resistance as possible and that's what Ubuntu gives you.

For some reason I missed this post before. So anyone that uses any other distro besides Ubuntu is a twat? This kind of fanboyism is childish, and not to mention not even accurate. Ubuntu most certainly does not a larger userbase than all other distros combined. In fact, for the last 30 days, its not even the top distro on distrowatch anymore, PCLinuxOS is. Linux is like this. A lot of distros have had their turn at being the "favored" distros for a year or couple years, than the torch gets passed. Now, it seems to be PCLinuxOS' turn, untill in a year or two something else comes along.

Just try Mandriva 2007.1 Spring propably the best distro for newbie.

http://www.petitiononline.com/7730722/petition.html

Originally posted by james.faction:

After giving it a good test drive, I'd definitely recommend Knoppix.

Knoppix has a really good keyboard chooser as well, sitting next to the clock on the right. It just looks like a flag - did you miss that?

It's been a while, but Knoppix used to have a reputation for being kind of buggy when installed to the hard drive. That may have changed, but this is supposed to be one of the reasons why they invented kanotix.

If I was starting out today, I'd do exactly what James is doing, which is try out a bunch of live CDs and get familiar with the desktop and its applications, and put off the commitment to a hard drive install for a little while. The important thing to note here is that live CD perfomance is a poor predictor of how a distro will work out for you when installed to the hard drive, but it's still a nice way to get comfortable, and get some perspective.

One thing that might help you relax and have fun with live cds is to install a linux, ANY linux, to the hard drive, preferably with an ext3 filesystem, and that would make it easy for you to save and access your data from the live CDs. Many live cds (knoppix and kanotix, for example) will make it easy for you to mount your hard drives. Any other live cd distro can do it with a complex command:

mkdir -m 755 /harddisk ; mount -t ext3 -o rw /dev/hda1 /harddisk

A "complex command" means a command that contains two or more simple commands seperated by semicolons. The first part of the command creates a directory called "harddisk". The second part of the command "mounts" the harddrive partition named "hda1" at the "harddisk" directory, so you can access the hardrive by copying to and from that directory. There's a command for mounting windows ntfs partitions, but you can generally only read those partitions from Linux. Writing to them is difficult, and generally not reccomended.

myklm: my experience with Mandriva was very poor. It may have just been a driver issue. I'd even rate Ubuntu over Mandriva based on what it did on my 3 test machines, and Ubuntu wasn't too crash hot either.

blackbelt_jones: I suspect Knoppix may have outgrown that reputation, although I haven't actually tried the HDD installation yet.

I've observed that Kanotix development has *nearly* halted for over a year now. From my live CD experience, Knoppix appears to have caught up on the advantages Kanotix had. Knoppix hasn't stopped development. It will definitely be at the top of my list for a HDD install.

There's some good instructions for committing Knoppix to HDD in their wiki which is linked from the welcome to Knoppix page on the CD.

Remember that Kanotix is essentially a delivery system for SID (unstable debian), so, as a harddrive install, Kanotix continues to develop because SID continues to develop. One upgrade, and you're up to the minute.

I really don't know what repositories Knoppix uses, but if it also uses the SID repoisitories, that may mean that the difference between installing kanotix and knoppix is minimal. Right now, my first reccomendation (in most cases) to a newbie who wants to go with Debian would be to go ahead and install Etch from the web, it's actually pretty easy.

After a certain point, Knoppix wouldn't support my piece of shit monitor, so I stopped trying it, but now that I have a new kickass LCD monitor, there's no reason not to take another look at Knoppix.

Originally posted by james.faction:

blackbelt_jones: I suspect Knoppix may have outgrown that reputation, although I haven't actually tried the HDD installation yet.

It's very possible, but knoppix is unlike most live CDs in that it's primarily intended to be used as a live CD. When I booted the latest knoppix (stunningly beautiful desktop, by the way) and read the English information, the introduction was all about using knoppix as a live CD. A hard drive install wasn't even mentioned.

Knoppix does run great as a live CD, though, at least so far. I'm looking at a classic KDE desktop, with a nice set of basic applications.

JUST TRIED A HARDDRIVE INSTALL WITH KNOPPIX

and yeah, it was buggy.

Specifically, there was a problem with root access for desktop applications. I was supposed to get a dialog box asking for the root password, but instead I got an error message. This prevented me from getting the installed knoppix system online.

@blackbelt_jones

Perhaps this link on Knoppix will be useful to you, http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/HD_Install_Warning_not_to_do_it as background information if nothing else.

Have you tried the Fedora 7 live CD yet. I have both Fedora 7 and debian etch installed here, and fedora is by far my favorite. However, I've been using fedora for a while now, so can't say its easy or not, its just second nature to me, I will say though, Fedora finds all my hardware, and sets up perfect out of the box (Debian etch also works perfect, but requires edits to xorg.conf for display settings).

Grab the Live cd from here.

http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora.html

For all the codecs, nvidia drivers and other none-free stuff Fedora will NEVER include; This blog has a great of set instructions.

http://www.diffingo.com/blog/content/blogcategory/7/33/

On a side note: Asking what's the best Distro for any reason is pointless, all have fans, all have enemies. Try them all, and don't go for the easiest to use, a distro that requires a little work will help you learn a little more about Linux, GUI tools are fine, but when something breaks they are the worst things ever. Knowing a little CLI is always an advantage.

A bit off topic but...
When I first started trying different flavors of Linux, I spotted something in the "post your desktop" thread.
Actually, I found a lot of helpful stuff there. I knew zero.
The point...
Google for " Linux Dictionary " there are several to look at, I downloaded a PDF.
This was the single most helpful thing I did.
<edit> plus an external modem</edit>
Hope it helps others looking to try Linux.

I've tried an oibscene amount of Distros over time, and while I currently multi-boot XP, Ubuntu, and Debian Etch, for a newbie I would highly recommend either PCLinuxOS or Linux Mint. Both offer exceptional out of the box support for multimedia and plugins such as flash and java, and are quite simple to use and administer. Also, both come as Live Cds you can try out first, then install from a live desktop if you so desire. Out of all the many I have tried, these are 2 that really make it easy to use and play with them.

Originally posted by james.faction:

yeah it's just that it's turned on by default in in knoppix - and kanotix. I only mentioned it because mimi_s_mum here was having trouble with setting her keyboard, she may not have realised the flag icon next to the clock is how you do it.

Hi james. Took me over two months to realise you were telling something to me. I did know about the keyboard chooser; position of the flag icon is very similar in Win. My problem with Japanese version of Knoppix then was that if I set the keyboard to English, I couldn't type Japanese; if I set it to Japanese, I got the wrong letters. (It was very frustrating because Ja-Knoppix was working fine on my father's computer.) It doesn't matter as I've figured out now that I have to install both languages, including the UI environment; and skim needs to be installed and configured properly.

Are you still using Knoppix, james? I have played with SUSE for a while, but my old second hard drive (6Gb) was running out of space. So I stopped using it and have removed it about fortnight ago. I haven't given up Linux yet, though. I'm getting a new WinXP(!) laptop for my work (I need Win & Office because at odd occasions I was asked by the clients to enable revision tracking when editing. OpenOffice can't do that). Once I transfer all my work stuff to it, I'll (maybe reformat and) partition the main HDD in this desktop so that there's enough room for me to install SUSE again and the few bulky extras I wanted to try. I might also try Fedora and/or Ubuntu again.

Freespire,

It is the easiest Distro out there.

Originally posted by ackerman17:

Freespire,

It is the easiest Distro out there.

Aside from my special needs for multilingual support (I'm not the original poster, after all), which is not provided by PCLinux, Mint nor Freespire, I think the most important thing for a newbie is that the distro picks up your box's hardware configuration and makes it easy for you to use dialup connection or CD writable drive or whatever. As I said before, when I was still on dialup, only one distro, SimplyMEPIS, was able to detect my Intel modem correctly. Ubuntu didn't even have an apparent menu item for configuration of dialup modem. Still, a lot of people recommend Ubuntu as a good distro for a newbie. So I'm a little skeptical here. When you said PCLinux, Mint or Freespire is easiest/best, had you actually tried it on several PCs and made sure all hardware config were picked up?

Mandriva - and hence PCLOS - handles Intel modems pretty easily. Since Mint and Mepis (and Freespire) are both based on Ubuntu, I'd expect them to perform pretty much like Ubuntu in terms of detection.

When I was still on dialup, I tried Ubuntu, Mepis, Knnopix and Fedora, and only Mepis was able to detect the modem, so 'A is based on B therefore A should work as well as B' kind of reasoning is not convincing enough to me.

Now I'm on cable network, I have no intention of testing Mint or PCL just to prove my point, espectilly since neither has multilingual support therefore useless for my requirements.

What I want to say is that, it would be better if people don't generalise and are more specific when sharing their experiences. I don't think a generic overstatement like 'Foreget C. D is the best' really helps the newbies much. For example those people recently recommended PCL, Mint or Freespire, if they shared what environment and hardware specs they had in successfully using those distros, then a newbie can judge herself whether their evaluation is applicable and relevant to her setup and requirements.

Test drive many LiveCD & then decide.



I have installed & like much, PCLinuxOS-2007.

Going to install SAM-2007 soon. After a successful LiveCD test drive. After backup clone of current setup. And a fresh remasterme of PCLOS.

Originally posted by sgunhouse:

Since Mint and Mepis (and Freespire) are both based on Ubuntu, I'd expect them to perform pretty much like Ubuntu in terms of detection.

Mint is the must Ubuntu like of the bunch, only it seems a bit nicer than Ubuntu itself has a few cool programs itself. Mepis is based on Ubuntu 6.06 and seems a bit dated and on my machine, it kept losing the network settings when I wasn't using DHCP. Lindows (intentional) needs to be burn in Hell for their CEO making accusations against other distros.

I've tried many destos for my Dell laptop, and I have settled with openSUSE 10.2. I had been running MEPIS for a while beforehand, it was good, but I wasn't happy with the Synaptic repository that it was using, so I tried Ubuntu and it failed to detect my videocard. So that's how I settled with openSUSE.

I wonder what waxfetish finally ended up with...