Hey all

[aluminumspleen]

I'm fairly new to Linux, but i'm anxious to learn. I joined this forum less than a day ago, and i've already visited about 10 times so far! I started with a dual-boot of Kubuntu/Vista, which was fine (since i visited Vista only for Skype and Nero Label Maker) until my college network admins found me out and booted me from the network. Since then, I've been "forced", to my dismay, to delete my linux partition from my laptop. *tear*

HOWEVER, i am currently building a new computer that will never see Microsoft Windows! hoorah, although i'm having trouble getting my harddrive to recognize a filesystem other than NTFS (its a Western Digital SATA).

I've been distro surfing, and have downloaded a bunch of ISO's from different "popular" distros, but I'm not sure which one to choose. I'm looking for stability, but also something that is visually pleasing. Does this magical OS exist? If so, has anyone seen it?

Looking forward to learning a lot in the threads. Thanks!

[smolloy]

Hi and welcome to the forums

I can't believe a network admin forced you to delete Linux!!? Why did they do that? What possible reason could they have? If it were me, I'd want everyone using Linux on my network

As for the "which distro" question, I tihnk you're doing the right thing. Try lots of distros, figure out how linux works, and then figure out the pros and cons of each distro. That's how I learnt -- I rarely had less than 3 distros installed on my machine at the same time for quite a while! This will give you a really good feel for how Linux works in general -- the command line, the idea of package management, the lack of viruses , etc. -- and allow you to learn the differences between the major types of distros.

If I were you, I'd make sure to try Ubuntu, Fedora, and Suse. These are good starter distros, and cover a lot of the major differences between distros.

Anyway, good luck with your search, and good luck persuading your network admins to allow Linux.

Hope to see you around!


EDIT: Make sure to start a separate thread about that hard drive issue if you're still having problems. We'll see what we can do

[aluminumspleen]

Thanks for your suggestions! I'm currently downloading the ISO's for both SUSE and Fedora, and I'm quite excited to explore what they have to offer!

As for them kicking me off the network for having Linux, their reason was "It's a security risk." I'll give you a second to let your heart restart.

Thanks again for everything, and if my hard drive problem gets too frustrating (I've already spent ~10 hours trying to figure it out using a version of Puppy I installed on a USB stick --- very cool!, but still not working how I'd like), I will surely post it in another thread. See you around!

[elija]

My guess is they meant it will show up their crappy security.

If that had been me, I wouldn't have endeared myself to them by asking "why are you an admin? is it some form of hideous experiment?"

I would have kept Linux on there and told them to "**** Off" and then complained if they tried to kick me off

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

Hope you continue to have fun with Linux.

[smolloy]

As for them kicking me off the network for having Linux, their reason was "It's a security risk." I'll give you a second to let your heart restart.

Wow.

Man, someone needs to have a serious talk with them!

[aluminumspleen]

Wow.

Man, someone needs to have a serious talk with them!

Yeah, that's what i'm sayin! I wanted to just say "ha, i'll do what I want, you ignorant soandso's!" but then I realized that, since i'm in college, they have the power to cut off my internet. Which they did, until I deleted the partition.

The woman in the IT office literally cursed at me. It was actually kind of satisfying seeing her frustration, knowing that it was all these years of working with a Windows network that caused it. But you didn't hear that from me