[pyro-manic]

I'm looking at installing Linux on my 'puter, but I'm unsure as to what distribution to use (having an Athlon64 adds to my confusion :dizzy: ). I know there are some users here, so any opinions would be useful. I run the following:

Athlon 64 3500+
Asus A8V deluxe mobo
Radeon X800 Pro
SATA hard drive

Many thanks...

[pyro-manic]

Anyone? My googling has come to naught...

[kode]

ubuntu is quite good, I must say.

maybe I liek it because it's debian based and it usually finds all your hardware, but I believe other than me likes it too. I think it won some price as "best new distribution" or something recently.

[Martinus]

Originally posted by kode
ubuntu is quite good, I must say.

maybe I liek it because it's debian based and it usually finds all your hardware, but I believe other than me likes it too. I think it won some price as "best new distribution" or something recently.

[color=66ff00]Yeah, it seems to be pretty friendly too from what I've been reading. Gentoo is my distro of choice but the installation can be tricky if you try to build from scratch, there are intermediate builds that take less time but give you less options.

Take a look at knoppix for an example of a debian distro. It's hardware detection is remarkable.
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[Fury]

Well try SuSe 9.2. Download mirrors.
What you want is SUSE-Linux-9.2-FTP-DVD.iso, you need a DVD burner and a DVD±RW or ±R. One of the german mirrors.

The dvd image has both i586 and x86_64 in it.

[WMCoolmon]

If you choose Gentoo, prepare yourself for a 24-hour install time, possibly with you holding your computer's hand for much of it.

Yoper is my favorite distro, it ran faster than my Gentoo64 config and is ready to go right out of the box. It starts up slower and the kernel is less optimized, but a very good distro to begin learning Linux on IMHO. The init scripts are clean and relatively straightforward, and it's based on Linux From Scratch, and there's plenty of software it comes with/is available from the apt archives.

Install for it is literally a 20 minute process if you know how you're going to setup your hard drive.

It also comes with NVIDIA support, you pretty much just have to check one box on the SaX configuration screen that comes up after the install.

Edit: Gentoo's install is also completely from the command line...it's a good way to learn Linux commands, but if you have problems you'll need to know the ones to fix the prob.

[Martinus]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
If you choose Gentoo, prepare yourself for a 24-hour install time, possibly with you holding your computer's hand for much of it.

Yoper is my favorite distro, it ran faster than my Gentoo64 config and is ready to go right out of the box. It starts up slower and the kernel is less optimized, but a very good distro to begin learning Linux on IMHO. The init scripts are clean and relatively straightforward, and it's based on Linux From Scratch, and there's plenty of software it comes with/is available from the apt archives.

Install for it is literally a 20 minute process if you know how you're going to setup your hard drive.

It also comes with NVIDIA support, you pretty much just have to check one box on the SaX configuration screen that comes up after the install.

Edit: Gentoo's install is also completely from the command line...it's a good way to learn Linux commands, but if you have problems you'll need to know the ones to fix the prob.

[color=66ff00]Too true, sorry I should have mentioned this.
Bear in mind that this assumes that you're compiling KDE or one of the other big packages, it's faster but less efficient to download the binaries.  Xfce4 is rather great and is much faster to compile if you're looking a great desktop.

I would add that it's a great learning experience though. Installing Gentoo from stage 1 gets you into many of the day to day commands in Gentoo not to mention that you'll learn a lot about the filesystem, kernel and lots of other errata.
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[pyro-manic]

Mkay.... Didn't understand half of that... I'm primarily looking for something that's easy to use, as I'm not hugely bothered about customization etc. - I just want it to work so I don't have to use windows all the time.

I'm downloading ubuntu, and I'll try it out, but I don't know what the hell I'm doing, so I may be back with a list of questions shortly. Many thanks for the tips.