zero_one said:
1.Im a gamer..
2.Im using XDA mini.. (which is windows mobile, that's why im planning to replace it with
Motorola E680 that uses linux)
3.Im a newbie.. (in Linux World)
1 - Being a gamer doesn't cut you off from Linux, it all depends on what games you play. Since Linux is not monolithic like Windows, it's more difficult for game houses to write for & port to. The user base is also much smaller. I do recommend dual-booting though.
2 - Is this the device you want to install Linux on, or do you just want to be certain your desktop OS supports it?
3 - You can rub the noobness off through research, manuals and practice :haha:
Choice of distribution is pretty close to talking religion. I personally run SuSE. It's less popular here in the states, but (last I looked) is more popular than RedHat/Fedora in Europe. For me the choice is part comfort & part the fact that I like KDE better than GNOME & SuSE is more natural for KDE, while RH is more natural for GNOME. For a Windows-like install & experience, Ubuntu (or even KUbuntu, which is Ubuntu w KDE) is a very good choice. Gentoo, Ubuntu, Mandriva, RH/Fedora & SuSE all practically setup themselves in most situations.
I know SuSE will resize NTFS partitions, having done it. I'm certain most of the distros I've listed above will also. No need to cripple your install with FAT-32 anymore. All of the above distros will also boot from EXT3 partitions now, so I recommend using it for anything that Windows doesn't need access to. EXT3 is a very robust journaling file system - will even recover from minor disk crashes as long as the data can be reconstructed.
The only things that currently keep me in Windows are higer-end games & MS-Money. Evolution is an excellent Outlook replacement. Open-Office can replace the rest of the Office suite unless you commonly run things that have embedded macros. Mozilla Firefox for the browser.
Security is as good as you're willing to put up with, and you can set it to anywhere in between very lax & totally locked down - it all depends on your preference and the effort you're willing to expend.
I would suggest you install your Windows system, leaving a full disk for Linux, plus a 10-20G space on your primary drive. Experiment with some distributions, and find what you like. Here's an excellent starting point:
http://www.linux.org/