Hi All,
For various reasons, it looks like I’m moving to Linux for my 3d work, and maybe moving my kids systems for security reasons.
So I go to redhats site & see they’re not distributing any more (I know, old news to most of you).
So my question is; what is currently the best distribution of LINUX as of Q4 2004?
It’s rather subjective, for some are better than others at different things.
But what I’d recommed is either Mandrake or SuSE. I use Mandrake, and it holds your hand a lot and is great for a beginner. However, SuSE is also from what hear easy to use & setup as well, and I’ve heard that it’s desktop is a little nicer than Mandrake. And then for stability there is always Deibain or it’s new, easy to use version, Ubuntu…
ummmm…how old are youre kids,…and are they prepared to learn code to simply run a program? :Z
For my kids I’ll just install an GUI. All they need to run is OpenOffice, Mozilla, Thunderbird & KDE IM…maybe gimp.
However, my kids do know HTML & my 10 year old once got grounded for hacking her sister’s PC :o
Thanks, Toast!
on the redhat site, as you said, is a link to fedora core and the last freely available distro, redhat9 is also still available.
both are very recomandable and well documented (get the rh9 books in pdf), also available on the redhat site, just dont stop after three clicks!
its the best bet to get you started, as things arepretty stable and relative ease of use is given. but make sure to read the docs or any other books a unix/linux at your local public-libary, where there must be books including whole distros, like the redhat9 one.
once your confortable with it, try other distros and find one for your taste.
after half a dozen flavors of linux and BSD I actually went back to redhat9 and just customized it to my needs with the 2.6.5 kernel, etc.it is very stable and functionality guaranteed.
yeah. http://distrowatch.com/
and this top 10 reviews:
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major
I use Fedora Core 2, (there’s 3 now.)
i have Debian Sarge installed (the testing distribution). i started from the minumal install and added all programs i needed through apt-get, aptitude and the Synaptic Package Manager (easy to use nice Gnome front end). they have a huge archive, all i searched for was there - except for Midnight Commander!!! >X(
as mentioned earlier, for an easy to use Debian based distribution, try Ubuntu. it comes with Gnome 2.8, kernel 2.6.8. for XOrg you’ll have to wait 6 month but the patched Xfree86 Debian offers is quite stable and fast. far better than my previous Mandrake experience (but back then kernel 2.4.x was state of the art, so Linux was quite sluggish as a “desktop” alternative - note: i use Gnome, as i consider it the most coherent desktop (alright, XFCE is very nice and Window Maker is really cool)).
ah, almost forgot, educate your kids 
: LyX is a fantastic WYSIWYM text editor (last M stands for “mean”). it is based on TeX, the fabulous typesetting program so you’ll get great looking output. very well documented also. drop OpenOffice, it’s slow and bloated
I’ll check LyX out…I agree about OpenOffice…
Thanks so much for all this great input.
Do any of distributions work best in a dual boot setup. & while I’m on the matter, anyone have any suggestions for the least painful way to go about this. I really need a dual boot system with Linux & Windows XP Home. I’m willing to spend a little $ on something like partition magic if that will make it less painful (I tried once with w2k & redhat 7 & never got it to work 
)
I just found “OSL2000 - An Advanced Multi Boot Manager”, will check it out
dual boot is not a problem!
install first XP, then make a partition for Linux (from Control Panel/Administartive Tools/Computer Management/Storage/Disk Management). leave it empty, you won’t need to format it. however, it’s not possible to resize existing partitions without formatting them - here’s why Partition Magic is useful. extended partitions can be further split into partitions.
start the Linux installer, point it to that partition and let the installer do it’s job. chose to install Grub or Lilo, boot managers, in the primary master boot sector. they will keep the windows boot information. when you reboot you will be prompted with a list of options too boot (windows, linux, linux recovery mode). Grub is cool because you won’t need to re-instal it if you recompile you kernel. its configuration file will be /boot/grub/grub.conf, where you can specify options and which OS will boot first.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/index.php will help greatly. success!
also, with a dual-boot system you’ll probably want to be able to write to Windows NTFS partitions. the following tool does just that, using Windows’ own files.
http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive
Thanks, Ale!! 
Question: I have 3 IDE drives in my system:
Do I have to install both OS’s on the same drive or can I put them on diferent drives? If I have put on same drive, would 1GB be enought for LINUX? (I’d probably allocate 2gig because of the software I’d install).
Thanks Again!! This has been a huge help.
However, my kids do know HTML & my 10 year old once got grounded for hacking her sister’s PC
One thing you’ll need to know before fully entering the GNU/GPL world is the real terms of “hacking” and “cracking”.
Read these:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/cracker.html
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
Some more things:
I’m not going to tell you what distro to go with (I suggest ubuntu because I’ve heard it’s debian based and it’s friendly) but I’m going to say that you need to learn how to navigate on the console/terminal. That’s the commandline or “shell”. Most distros use “bash”. There is tab auto-completion of file names, so hit tab (linke in irc) to get a list of names.
Second is that though IRC may be a nasty element sometimes irc.freenode.net has (most) of the official channels for:
#suse
#linux (that’s two hashes ‘#’)
#redhat
#fedora
#mandrake
#gentoo
ubuntu (I think)
#debian
Feel free to join and ask questions, most every will be more than happy to answer (don’t ask to ask, and don’t ask several times over in the space of an hour).
Also try linuxquestions.org.
Have fun!!!
they don’t have to be on the same partition. 1GB is way too few space, give it more, give it 5 remember you wanted your kids to have mail ad such
Can I just install Windows on one 10GB & Linux on the other 10GB…or do they both need to be on the boort disk?
you can install where ever you like. most distros of linux install a tool called LILO or GRUB which is a bootloader and will tell your computer to boot from hd1 or hd2.
I use fedora core 2
#3 has just been released
very smooth, stable and does everything I want to do
like alot of people , I dual booted first with windose and linux, after about a year
I found that I didn’t use windose anymore
I reformatted put on a clean install of Fedora and never looked back
it was a real nice feeling
cheers
lilo
That would be really, really nice!