[Sandwich]

Ok, I've had to reinstall Windows XP, and at the same time, I got a new 250Gb HDD and consolidated a couple of my older IDE drives onto that monster. So now, I'm left with an empty 14Gb IDE HDD with no reason to exist. So I figure I can finally properly install some distro of Linux onto the drive instead of futzing around with live CD versions.

Attached is my HDD status. I'd put a Linux distro on the 14Gb drive if at all possible.

My question for you guys is this: keeping in mind that I've never really gotten into Linux before, and that I'm next-to-helpless in the command prompt (console?) without specific instructions, which Linux distro should I install? I think I'd rather go for a distro that will "just work" at the basic level initially, allowing me to get more in-depth in my own time. However, I don't want to have to spring for some totally obscure distro - I'd rather just use Red Hat or Mandriva over Distro 8472, even if they are a bit less friendly, if you get my drift.

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[achtung]

I say SuSe, It's the first I used, and I still like it.  Plus SuSe comes with a couple of GUIs, KDE being teh most windows like and Gnome, the more original.  SuSe comes with firefox and all other useful apps that you may need.  I took to it quick, very easy to figure out.

[an0n]

Anything with apt-get.

[Col. Fishguts]

I'd say Gentoo. It has a fool-proof install guide, offers great flexibility and has an apt-get derivate (portage) which makes installing/managing software packages very, very easy.

Install guide starts here

As a matter of fact, I'm installing it on my old machine as I type.

If you're really lazy, go with SuSe. It's easier and faster to install than XP. But it comes with a lot of crap I don't need. And it lacks apt-get or portage, which I would really miss.

[Taristin]

Everything I have read says that Gentoo is not for beginners.

Whatever you do choose, make sure you can get the bootloader to load windows too...
I make no claims to being competant with Linux, but for all I tried I couldn't get Windows to dualboot with it. It was always one bootloader or the other.

[Cyker]

Gentoo isn't particularly hard, you just need to be able to READ (This is a dying skill...)

But, unless you have several days to spare, I wouldn't start off on Gentoo - Most Linux newbies end up re-installing their distro a few times to get it how they want because they aren't skilled enough to mod it once it's in place (Not a trivial thing if you don't know what you're doing lemme tell ya!! ), and Gentoo is painful to install (IMHO! And I'm a Slackware user!! ), espescially if you're new because you need to do a LOT of reading.

If you put the effort in 'tho, you get one of the fastest setups possible


What LiveCD were you using?
Most Distro's feel VERY different from one another, and if you're used to, say, Knoppix, you don't want to use something that has a Gnome desktop because it'll confuse the heck out of you.

If your LiveCD has a self-installer, then I'd go for that assuming it does the job for you to begin with.

Alternatively, a good newbie distro is Ubantu (Ubuntu?) - Debian based, so it has apt-get which is a really nice installer system. It's not as Kitchen-Sink as other distros, and seems quite clean to use.
Like Knoppix, you can do most of everything you need through GUI, although as with any distro I recommend you at least get comfortable with the CLI at some point if you intend to push the disto beyond it's initial install setup


I personally compile everything from source, but I hate portage so I use a hacked Slackware distro as a base and make my own tgz packages to stick things on top of it. Life's too short 'tho, so I might actually have to learn howto use Gentoo properly for my next run...

[Sandwich]

Whatever you do choose, make sure you can get the bootloader to load windows too...
I make no claims to being competant with Linux, but for all I tried I couldn't get Windows to dualboot with it. It was always one bootloader or the other.

That was gonna be my next question... WinXP is installed onto the 60Gb IDE, Linux of some sort will be installed onto the 14Gb IDE, leaving the 2 SATA drives. What should I do to ensure that the WinXP bootloader is the one that remains in charge (in case I ever need to remove the 14Gb Linux drive, I'd rather my system not be stuck looking for a Linux bootloader on a drive that doesn't exist anymore)?

[Rictor]

Since I am also (vaguely) considering getting into Linux, I've heard that Ubuntu really tops all other distros when it comes to newbie friendliness. Of course, I can't speak from any personal experience, but the impression that I get from the Interweb is that Ubuntu is what you get when you want Linux to, as you said, "just work".

[Sandwich]

I used Knoppix Live a while back (year or two), and, more recently, Ubuntu Live. I'm pretty intuitive when it comes to figuring stuff out, so I probably COULD make do with pretty much any Linux distro once it was installed and running to the point where I had Internet access (to resolve any issues).

Unfortunately, I have neither time nor patience to learn Linux from the inside out like I'd like to, so I've decided to expose myself to the general outer presentation, get used to common terms and stuff. Top-down learning. I'm just not used to doing stuff that way, since I learned computers in general by starting with MS-DOS 5.0, and HTML and CSS by hand-coding it. I like to have control over as much as possible, but the problem with this and Linux is that it would take time that I don't have for me to aquire the knowledge required to excersice said control.

Since I've already used Ubuntu a wee bit, and I know that its hardware detection routines can identify enough of my computer's hardware to get Internet access, I'll probably install that.

[MatthewPapa]

use fedora core

i use it for the PXO server and I havent had any problems with it

the install is completely visual and straightforward

http://fedora.redhat.com/download/

[Martinus]

RPM's (the software packages) are a pain in the arse though.
I'd go with Ubuntu for it's huge community, apt-get and ease of use.

Gentoo is the 'deep end' as far as newb distro's go, I had to re-install three times before it worked for me, on the flipside I learned a hell of a lot about how a linux distro is put together and I got comfortable with the CLI (command line interface).

14GB is tonnes of room and the linux boot loader (lilo anyhow) can be installed onto any other drive without mucking about with XP's boot sector. You simply create a pointer to the winXP partition in a text file (like a *.ini) that tells lilo what partitons are available to boot.

[Fury]

Any distro that is based on Debian, like (K(Ubuntu.

[Descenterace]

FWIW, Mandrake or {Ku|U}buntu are probably the best for a beginner.

Myself, I started out with pure Debian, but I was setting up a server and didn't have enough disk for a GUI... My main machine runs Gentoo and it took about 8 hours to set up. Given that Gentoo's install time is usually 90% compilation time, that's mainly due to the speed of the machine rather than my competence.

Gentoo is very easy to use once you have some experience of Linux, mainly because the OS tools are set up from the beginning to do stuff with the source. This makes installing display drivers much easier; most of them need to compile something at some point, and new Mandrake users will often be confused as to why the driver won't install (clue: how many newbies consider a full set of compilers and the kernel headers to be of critical importance? )

IMO, the 'newbie Linuxen' should install all that stuff by default, just so new users can install proprietary drivers onto the default install without further fiddling with the Package Manager.

[Nuke]

use fedora core

i use it for the PXO server and I havent had any problems with it

the install is completely visual and straightforward

http://fedora.redhat.com/download/

seconded, i managed to get it working the way i wanted to on my 2nd install (i forgot to install some features i wanted and couldnt figure out how to install them later, so i started over). the install time i think was less than winxp. i did have some problems learning how to compile things but after downloading several packages got it to work finally. im already fairly comfortable with using it. if it wasnt that all my favorite graphics programs were windows only id use it exclusively.

im still sorta confused as to how the filesystem works. all those directories and it seems to have combined my two hard drives. id recomend installing the yum extender to help get any packages you may need. it really saves time over the cli.

[WMCoolmon]

(K)ubuntu.

Forums are big, IRC is easy to get at as it's the default server/channel for the IRC programs, and if you make enough noise someone will eventually respond unless it's something totally esoteric. (Drivers for a virtually unused sound card, for instance)

You would just not install a bootloader during the install to let XP's remain dominant, or you can use fixmbr from the XP cd if you accidentally install a bootloader (Google instructions before you start)

[Cyker]

Bootloader stuff:

I currently use GRUB as my bootloader - It loads on boot and offers to load Slackware, or I can chain down to the the Windows 2000 bootloader and pick '98 or 2000.

If you want to do any sort of boot-menu, I HIGHLY recommend you use GRUB in favour of LILO - LILO is ancient and a PITA; Assuming nothing's changed, you have to re-initialise it everytime you compile the kernel, and if you forget to and reboot you hose your system!
GRUB has big advantages over LILO if you move stuff around - LILO will break but GRUB will still work (And if it doesn't you can edit it on the fly to point to the right places!!)

I have GRUB in my MBR, and even if I take out all the hard disks except IDE0 (My boot) it will still be able to chain to the Win2000 boot loader and get me into Windows '98. (2K is on SATA1, Slackware is on SATA2)


You can get GRUB/LILO to boot to both Windows and Linux directly, but it's easier to leave the Windows boot loader in place and have GRUB/LILO chain to it. If you find a two-step bootprocess annoying 'tho, you may want to put in the extra work to get it to boot directly.

It *IS* possible to use the Windows bootloader to boot Windows or Linux, but I've never gotten it to work - From what I gather it's non-trivial...

[kode]

as many others have said, something debianbased. like k/ubuntu

[Descenterace]

im still sorta confused as to how the filesystem works. all those directories and it seems to have combined my two hard drives. id recomend installing the yum extender to help get any packages you may need. it really saves time over the cli.

It hasn't combined the disks. The UNIX filesystem is mostly independant of disk filesystems. The root filesystem is constructed from one partition, but some bits are constructed only in memory. /proc, /sys and /dev don't actually exist on the disk.
All partitions, including root partition, are 'devices'. For instance, your primary hard disk is 'hda' and the partitions on it are named 'hda1', 'hda2', etc. You mount these devices on the filesystem to add them to it.

UNIX does not use drive letters. That idea was introduced, IIRC, by CP/M, and then DOS made it mainstream (possibly the biggest step backward in the history of computing).

[Sandwich]

Bootloader stuff:

I currently use GRUB as my bootloader - It loads on boot and offers to load Slackware, or I can chain down to the the Windows 2000 bootloader and pick '98 or 2000.

If you want to do any sort of boot-menu, I HIGHLY recommend you use GRUB in favour of LILO - LILO is ancient and a PITA; Assuming nothing's changed, you have to re-initialise it everytime you compile the kernel, and if you forget to and reboot you hose your system!
GRUB has big advantages over LILO if you move stuff around - LILO will break but GRUB will still work (And if it doesn't you can edit it on the fly to point to the right places!!)

I have GRUB in my MBR, and even if I take out all the hard disks except IDE0 (My boot) it will still be able to chain to the Win2000 boot loader and get me into Windows '98. (2K is on SATA1, Slackware is on SATA2)


You can get GRUB/LILO to boot to both Windows and Linux directly, but it's easier to leave the Windows boot loader in place and have GRUB/LILO chain to it. If you find a two-step bootprocess annoying 'tho, you may want to put in the extra work to get it to boot directly.

It *IS* possible to use the Windows bootloader to boot Windows or Linux, but I've never gotten it to work - From what I gather it's non-trivial...

Ok, this sounds like what I'm looking for. Could you give me a stage-by-stage breakdown of how to go about installing Ubuntu onto my 2nd IDE drive without wiping out the XP bootloader, and at what point I toss this GRUB thing into the mix? Keep in mind that I want to be able to pull the plug on my 2nd IDE w/o WinXP brainfarting.

[IceFire]

Tommorow I'm going to install SuSE 10 on my IDE hard drive much like Sandwich is.  Thats the plan anyways.  I imagine that it'll go fairly smoothly?  Its got a graphical interface for managing the installation so it should be just like Windows I imagine...

Anything I should know about dual booting?  WinXP is still my primary...