I was givin a Dell computer. I want to reformat the harddrive and put Linux on it to "learn" about and play with the OS. I'v never got to play on Linux but always wanted to. What steps i need to take? I'v downloaded a 2disc Linux OS. I know i will need to search out the drivers for the sound card, video card, and motherboard. Any guidence will be appreciated. Thanks for your help.

Hey

I am pretty novice on linux myself, but i installed afew boxes. From my experience, if you have a rather new distribution, you dont need any additional drivers afaik. What you really need to do is just to burn out the iso's and boot your old Dell up on the first one, and then follow the onscreen instructions.

A good distro could be the Fedora Core, which is pretty straight forward. Allso Ubunto is very good for the novice from my experience. And i do think that you should go with the most userfriendly one you can get.

I think in ubunto there is a automatic update system, allso for drivers, but since this is a test station, you can just try out different flawors of distro's.

Just one thing, when u get to the partition part of the installation, just let the built in diskprobe do its thing, since you can easely screw something up. This part is very different from windows OS'es, in the way it uses like 5+ different partitions instead of like 1 or 2.

Yes and depending on the distro, take Fedora Core 5 for example. People get so confused with the mounting and partitioning. My first distro was Fedora Core 4. I got tired of it, to much of a hassel :P. Back to my tweaked out windows

Ubuntu's good.
You should try a live cd. They help you learn, and they let you play around, without messing with crucial files.

www.ubuntulinux.org either download the 697MB file using broadband, or request a few ShipIt Cds (which are free by the way)

My first use with Linux was with Red Hat 6.4, which was a huge hassel, when i Moved up to Red Hat Fedora Core 3 I slammed my head against the desk because all of the experience i had from the old version, was useless.

Most Linux's are pretty much hassel free, unless noted. There are some out there that are NOT user friendly.


http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=52

Heres a good one for starters, it gives you an option to run the OS in Mac OS X,Windows XP or Default style layout.
Also it comes with most average Packages already installed, and some that are hard to find (Media Player)


Wine (Windows Emulator) comes on it to, im not sure if its already configured (probably not) so you could get some major experience on that :knock:

I used debian for a long time. It was easy to install and it comes with an awesome apt package manager. You can even do a net install with just one disk. http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/

Recently I installed Fedora Core 5, and I am very impressed with it. My only complaint was the lack of a good package manager, but I found one called "yum" and I actually like it better than apt.

http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html
http://www.fedorafaq.org/#installsoftware

Hope that helps.

jimwalt