A start to a linux path

[sainthero]

Well heres how it goes. I recently got a new computer from Dell and my laptop hardly ever gets used anymore. As I was just thinking to myself oneday I decided it would be a great Idea to expand my knowledge from Windows to Linux! Now I hate Bill Gates as much as the next guy ( I suppose Im entitled to my opinion), but I really dont want to do anything to my Dell which at the moment I cherish because of its wonderful graphics card, not wanting to play around with the os or anything on that.

So the other day I downloaded Mandriva Free as a normal basic kinda, 'lets see how this goes' kinda thing. I downloaded all four cds and installed the os but after it rebooted It kinda just went in to a kind of command prompt mode on system boot up and nothing else. I tried reinstalling it, (didnt work). Now ticked off that Mandriva took ages to get to work and nothing really came of it I reseached into these here forums a bit more.

I looked at a few topics and people mentioned Red Hat was a good beginner linux os. I looked at their site and thought, 'wait.... doesnt it cost? Oh and the trial only lasts a month...' so I didnt really like that. I looked into the previous versions of Red Hat and couldnt really find anything to do with them. So Im kind of stuck.

Could anyone, help me or just point me in the direction of a newb friendly linux os? I dont really mind what it is, Im just so eager to try out Linux. Thanks for your time. Any help is welcome ^ ^.

[oz]

Welcome to the forums, sainthero!

Take a look a look at the link in my signature for some clues about where to start. If you try a distribution and have problems with it, start a new thread and we'll see if we can help.

oz

[techieMoe]

...but I really dont want to do anything to my Dell which at the moment I cherish because of its wonderful graphics card, not wanting to play around with the os or anything on that.

What graphics card does it have in it? Nvidia cards run quite well in Linux, but ATI cards can take some work.

So the other day I downloaded Mandriva Free as a normal basic kinda, 'lets see how this goes' kinda thing. I downloaded all four cds and installed the os but after it rebooted It kinda just went in to a kind of command prompt mode on system boot up and nothing else. I tried reinstalling it, (didnt work). Now ticked off that Mandriva took ages to get to work and nothing really came of it I reseached into these here forums a bit more.

If you want to get Mandriva working, start a thread in the Mandriva section and we might just be able to fix your problem.

I looked at a few topics and people mentioned Red Hat was a good beginner linux os. I looked at their site and thought, 'wait.... doesnt it cost? Oh and the trial only lasts a month...' so I didnt really like that. I looked into the previous versions of Red Hat and couldnt really find anything to do with them. So Im kind of stuck.

Redhat doesn't make a free desktop version of their Linux distribution anymore, but there are free Redhat-based distros out there that you might like. Redhat sells Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but they make the sourcecode available for free as well. CentOS is a distribution made from that exact sourcecode, so it's essentially an identical (and no cost) version of Redhat Enterprise.

Fedora is another Redhat-based distribution that's quite popular. It's a little more current than Redhat Enterprise because they like to test out new things. The downside is that Fedora Core doesn't get as thoroughly tested as RHEL or CentOS do.

Could anyone, help me or just point me in the direction of a newb friendly linux os? I dont really mind what it is, Im just so eager to try out Linux. Thanks for your time. Any help is welcome ^ ^.

As ozar said, we can't really tell you what to try; we can only tell you where to look for a list. Linux distributions are very personal, much like favorite flavors of ice cream. Here is a collection of common questions asked by new users of Linux, including "Which distribution should I use?"

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/lin...ead-first.html