Installing Linux

[WhatsWrongWithMySocks]

Hi there, first of all i just wanna let you know im pretty new to linux, although ive had a bash at fedora 7 before my computer decided enough was enough and died, but here i am wanting to get away from windows once more and with the extra time i have now i can put a bit more effort into getting a grasp of things

What i would like to know is which distro should i pick this time and would it support my computers wireless card as last time i spent a week on just messing with Ndiswrapper to get it to support my belkin FD7051 wireless adapter i did have success though and managed to get it to work although i had to manually load in the drivers myself when it started, anyway im now using a lenovo laptop here are the specs

Lenovo X61s
Dual core 1.60 Ghz processor
1 gig ddr2 ram
intel 965 chipset 256mb graphics card

and my wireless card is a
Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AG

The specifics of the card are here should you happen to want them,
intel.com/network/connectivity/products/wireless/wireless_n/overview.htm

would i have alot of messing around to do if i installed a version of linux? I know theres always going to be tweaking and some issues i would have to attend to which i dont mind, well thanks for reading this post

[daark.child]

One solution is to try several distros, evaluate their performance on your system and then stick with whatever works best for you. Personally I've found openSUSE and Mandriva to have very good hardware support.

[reed9]

Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AG

There is an opensource driver for this card, so most distros support it out of the box. It may require extra firmware for some distros, notably Debian.

iwl4965 - Linux Wireless

[WhatsWrongWithMySocks]

Thank you for your reply's, i must apologize though as i was quite tired last night as my question on which distro to choose was a little vague, i meant to say as an inexperienced user with a small amount of c++ knoledge, which distro is a good equvilent of windows (as in not text based) with a desktop like fedora, you see the last time i got a copy of fedora i was told it wasnt a very good choice although im sumizing its heavily based upon opinions, thanks.

Sorry for the time wasting questions i know you guys can be very busy with more important questions and issues i just want to get started on the right track.

[reed9]

Outside of server oriented distros, almost all distros start you out with a desktop environment.

Fedora tends to implement new technologies quickly, and can be, as they say, "bleeding edge". Also, the project is pretty strict about only using free and open source software, and it's not as easy as with some distros to install non-free software, so you may find it more of a challenge to get non-free multimedia going, or get hardware that requires non-free drivers working. For these reasons, it's not always the best newbie distro.

For the least amount of post-installation fuss, Linux Mint is probably one of the best.

Ultimately, it's whatever works for you. It's really best if you can to try a bunch out and see what you like and what works best on your hardware. Pretty much any of the top 10 on distrowatch will do. Well, it looks like Arch is #10 right now and that's probably not where you want to start, but Mandriva, OpenSuse, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, or Mint are all good options.

[WhatsWrongWithMySocks]

Ill have to have a look into a few of them and see which i prefer, thank you for your advice it will be very useful and maybe i will be able to contribute to the world of open source (not very good with my associations)

thanks, Mike

[asepyusuf]

I agreed with reed9, for learning Linux distro and use windows like environment, LinuxMint is the closer and recently LinuxMint released their Karmic Koala version. Linux Mint 8.

[nujinini]

For the least amount of post-installation fuss, Linux Mint is probably one of the best.

I have installed 6 different distros in my laptop, (Fedora,Mandriva, Debian, Mint, SUSE & xp).
Still trying to make it 7 (arch)

I want to have a hands-on experience working with these several distros until I get to choose what would be home for me. Of course xp not being one of those choices. No offense please.

Anyway, I agree with reed9, I have observed that my Mint partition has given me the least of my post installation fusses.

Cheers!