Taking The Plunge! Which Distro?

[coolbeans]

I d/led mandrake 9.0 (first cd only) and I need alot of help and a little encouragement:D . I've been to alot of the links provided in the sticky up top but they just make me more confused.

Maybe someone can point me to the Linux for dummies site lol.
Just looking for some suggestions for a noob and a heads up on what to expect and how to properly prepare for installation.


TIA,
T.O.W

[MaXimum SMOKE]

Don't laugh, but a lot of people started out with one of those black & yellow "for dummies" books with a distro disk included. Kind of depends upon your background. Mandrake is a pretty polished install, but in my part of the US it seems far easier to find books on Redhat. Personally, I stated out with a redhat disto, that had a book with it. I recommend grabbing a book that you can understand, at your local bookseller, if they have a selection. If you go into it with a reference, you'll be better off. If you had a background in DOS, you may find it of great benefit.

[coolbeans]

I have a Linux book now but no distro came with it. Sadly money is tight right now and I can't afford another right now.

I planned on learning as I went, if I screwed up I figured I could boot back to windows for some help or a solution.

Should I start with an older, better documented version? RH 7.2
Mandrake 8.0?

[Eric H.]

mandrake is by far the best distro for beginners. the install is very user friendly, and the OS itself is easy to control, handle, and learn on.

[MaXimum SMOKE]

If you started downloading Mandrake 9, might as well finish it out. I'm guessing it's 3 disks? I would stick to the newest distro, that your hardware will support, since you won't be downloading as many security and bugfix updates that way. I generally set up my own partitions, a few meg for /boot , 200 to 300 for linux swap, the rest could go / (root not to be confused with /root ) However, I set up a partition for storage with a nonstandard name and use it for an area to set files, that I intend to keep even if I reformat the rest on a new install ;) before I set the rest aside for / , but the distro can set up it's own partitions, if need be. Mandrake usually uses a graphical disk partitioning program, so it's pretty straight forward. Just don't accidentally destroy your windows partition if you still need it ;)