What is the best way to test a distro?

[MASONTX]

What is the best way to test a distro? As a newbie, I am trying out several different distro's. I run them from a live CD and see if they are easy for me to set up my wireless, can be configured to multiple monitors, corectly recognize my hardware. I then connect to the internte and see if it plays videos or needs codecs downloaded, then connect to the reository and download any needed codecs, or pick a random program and see how easy it is to download and install.

Is this a reasonable way to check out a distro, or should I be looking at something else? Keep in mind, I am a newbie who is a user, not a hacker, and know nothing of the commandline yet.

[techieMoe]

What is the best way to test a distro? As a newbie, I am trying out several different distro's. I run them from a live CD and see if they are easy for me to set up my wireless, can be configured to multiple monitors, corectly recognize my hardware. I then connect to the internte and see if it plays videos or needs codecs downloaded, then connect to the reository and download any needed codecs, or pick a random program and see how easy it is to download and install.

Is this a reasonable way to check out a distro, or should I be looking at something else? Keep in mind, I am a newbie who is a user, not a hacker, and know nothing of the commandline yet.

Sounds like a solid procedure to me. I do something similar when trying out a distribution.

[oz]

I'm not aware of any way to actually test a distro other than by liveCD, or a full install. What works by liveCD should work with the full install method but it doesn't always work out that way, as many users have come here and reported problems once the distro is installed to the hard disk. In all those cases, I think it's simply some kind of configuration error causing the issues.

LiveCDs are great for seeing what a distro will look like, various emergency situations, and for running a multitude of utilities that one might need when troubleshooting or doing maintenance on a computer. Otherwise, I'm not fond of them because of the performance hit that comes with running them directly from the CD drive.

All that said, it seems to me that you are on the right track with your testing methods.

[MASONTX]

I am a humble user, so what I am looking for in the distro's I try is different from what many of the other posters may be looking for. I want to be able to put in the ISO live disk (and ultimately the installed version), and have it work with out a lot of tinkering. It should recognize all my hardware and automatically install the drivers for them. I use two monitors, so it should let me set them up not mirrored. It should have a good repository that can easily be searched and selected programs easily installed.

As a newbie simple user, I need everything to just work with out having to go to the command line or write scripts. Ubuntu meets that need on my desktop, and is what I have been using since I downloaded Hardy Heron. My dilemma comes from wanting to expand Linux to the other computers in my life. My wifes computers (she doesn't want to have to learn a new os), desktop and laptop, both fairly recent, my mother-in-laws computer (she is 80 and still struggling with learning Win98 SE), my ancient laptop (ubuntu wont run on it), and an older AMD 2600+ I keep for the grandkids to play on (ages 6-15).

To keep things simple, I have pretty much narrowed it down to some flavor of *buntu, but will probably need 3 or more to keep everyone happy. So far I have just been trying the out to see what is easy for me to use and maintain. Once I settle on a few top choices, I will put what I think would work best in each situation on the respective computers in a dual boot and get wife, mother-in-law, and grandkids comments.