another vote for Ubuntu - found it the easiest installation for a 'newbie'
try it here

THank you Jet II, looks like I'll give Dapper Drake a shot, pending of course more vehement recommendations from other Prooners :)

Breezy Badger, Dapper Drake, Feisty Fawn...

And they wonder why normal (boring) people think geeks are crazy! :}

Ubuntu (Kubuntu if you prefer a more Windows-like appearance - I prefer KDE to Gnome anyway) or Mepis.

I'm a Mepis guy me'self. Forums are better. Whole distro benefits from having Warren as the Fuhrer.

Welcome to freedom!

:ok:

Mac

Latest Ubuntu (feisty fawn, or 7.04 ) just came out of beta and comes as a 'live CD'. I think the final acknowledged probems were mainly hibernation/standby related. It's the first release that 'just works' with my latest motherboard. Hard drives are cheap, just install it on another disc and dual boot. Well worth playing with.

Mepis has slightly better hardware detection capability than Ubuntu/Kubuntu in my opinion. Mepis also has multimedia capability as distributed , whilst Ubuntu and derivatives do not include the "non-free", as in proprietary, code such as mp3 codecs. So for a live cd linux taster I would recommend Mepis. Knoppix has more geek tools than Mepis and is therefore a better emergency toolset live cd than Mepis but the menu structure is a bit messy and potentially confusing. Mepis has an icon on the desktop to initiate an install to your hard drive whereas to install Knoppix to a hard drive partition you have to run the command "knx2hd" in a command shell.

If you do decide to install Linux on a hard drive partition at a later stage, then Mepis is still good until you may want to install several flavours of Linux on different partitions (I have 3, one for working use and 2 experimental). In that case the Mepis installer will only write the Mepis instance into the grub boot loader and ignore the others. You will then have to modify the \boot\grub\menu.lst to add the other instances of Linux, or run grub install again from a knoppix live cd

Ubuntu claim to have addressed that in the latest release.

The Feisty Fawn / 7.04 Tour page includes a couple of updates:

This is a departure from earlier releases - as you say, it used to be down to the user to manually install anything that was proprietary or licenced.

RC

Just popping in to say that I'm posting this from Firefox inside Ubuntu's Dapper Drake LiveCD running off me computer! :ok:

So far so good - had to configure my network options - was wondering why the internet wasn't working and then had a Doh! realization. entered my local IP and default gateway and away she goes!

Now only if this thing would allow me to change from 640x480 to something less ghastly.... well, here goes some more tinkering!

Thanks one and all, and stay tuned for more silliness!

(Might even download Mepis tomorrow night and give that a shot too.... I love my DSL connection!)

Downloaded Kubuntu 7.04 yesterday and just loaded into one of my experimental partitions. Attempted to play an mp3 file and Amarok (a multimedia player for those that may not know) put up a dialogue box asking whether to download the codecs required (good) but then hung, not responding (bad). So it appears that there is probably an error in a script or perhaps it is not finding the expected files in the scripted respositories.

I tried using automatix to configure the codecs, but the automatix2 script was not in the directory described on the automatix web site. So for now the automatic configuration of proprietary codecs doesn't work. Shame. Otherwise the kubuntu install provides a clean, an unconfusing desktop with a clear menu structure that provides one application for each commonly used pc activities except games - there are no games loaded. Additional applications, including games, can readily be added using the adept package manager, but for a taster of what linux can do I think I still recommend mepis before kubuntu.

Is there any way of accessing your original hard drive from a LiveCD OS? Say if I wanted to play music from my hard disk while running Dapper Drake?

I don't think so, but since I am yet a n00b, I sit to be corrected. Of course I could load them on a USB drive and access the drive through linux, but that is just one option...

Sure is - you need to mount the device to access it, but this is usually simple. I can certainly do so with Knoppix.

I'm sure that others with greater experience can give you more details.

SD

I started with Knoppix when it was the only "boot from CD" that I knew about. It's pretty impressive. If you have a dud Windows installation, it's great for recovering stuff you don't want to lose. I've given out several Knoppix boot CDs to folks who've asked my help to recover their stuff.

I've got an old PC here with Mepis, Fedora, (k)Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, and Knoppix on it. Mepis was probably the quickest install, and did very well at finding all my hardware. It did extremely well booting from the CD.

Fedora has been the most "competent" - more of the obscure stuff worked first time round with that. It is a little harder to set up than Mepis (in my experience).

Networking and sharing folders/files/printers is difficult with Linux - Fedora was best, Mepis tricky. I've sussed it now, but the utilities don't seem to do what they say on the label. Plain old text editing on the Samba config file sorts it.

To be honest, Ubuntu didn't do well on my machine. There wasn't much included software, and download/install took forever. Mine's not sure whether it's Ubuntu or Kubuntu now, and does wacky things.

If you're just starting with Linux, download the Mepix ISO, burn a CD of that, and boot from it. You'll be impressed.

If you decided to use Linux as a network server, go through the normal setup routine. If it works, you've won. If not, send me your smb.conf file and I'll send you back the Keef version.

This afternoon I downloaded and installed Kubuntu and I'm using it now.
However, if my experience is anything to go by, it is likely that you will experience difficulty in connecting to the web.
In the past I have tried Suse Linux 10.0 which would connect to the Internet using the KDE browser but resolutely refused to do so when using Firefox.
As that was my preferred option I didn't pursue that distro any further.
I've also tried two versions of Ubuntu with no internet connectivity.
I'm using KDE at the moment but I suspect that if I try Firefox (as above) it too will fail.

Be prepared!

Can't say I've ever had any trouble with any distro (even Damn Small Linux and Puppy). Never had to do anything.

How do you connect? Dialup? ADSL? Cable?

Good Evening, Mac..........

I use a Safecom SWAMR-54108 broadand router. I did consider bringing out of retirement the original ADSL modem that my ISP supplied and seeking out the necessary driver but didn't pursue it any further.
Carrying out both web and Distro Forum searches reveals that the problem is far from uncommon, and in many cases insoluble.

N o t a

Edited to add:

In the last few minutes I've installed Firefox which seems to be working fine.
Another of life's little mysteries!

With all the Linuxes on mine, I've not had a problem getting different browsers to work - if one does, they all do. Sometimes it takes a while to set up the connection to the router (it's all cabled or wireless LAN in my house).

Networking the different machines can be a challenge with Linux, although it's normally very simple with Microsoft (unfortunately also a bit insecure, but that's what firewalls are for).

I like Kanotix (www.kanotix.com) although unfortunately the distro is having some upheavals. It's a Knoppix based distribution with some good improvements and some really good scripts. Being Knoppix based means it's also a Debian based system so benefits from Debian's excellent package management system.

It has rather good hardware detection, a plethora of software and useful fora/forums if you have a problem. It's the only distro I've found that got my laptop's winmodem working automatically.

Keef,

Thanks for your advice. I was reading up about Mepis last night and was very impressed. Decided to download it but after around 70% the website went down at the other end. Could not resume as I was forced to use IE's in built downloader, my Firefox has been messed up by Download Accelerator on uninstalling the latter. (If I wasn't in the presence of a chaplain here, I'd have cursed it :} ) I'm planning to give it a shot again, tonight.

No, my use of Linux will be limited to personal computing only, there will be no networking (in the LAN/WLAN/WAN sense), only the use of the internet through an ADSL line. So I guess I have no worries on that front.

But meanwhile will try to mount my existing hard drive from the Dapper Drake CD and see if I can get hold of data. As you say, will be most useful for data recovery. (Touch wood)

Now if only I could get it to run at 800x600.... Googling for a solution has not helped so far, tried to set it before installing, after installing, via the GUI and terminal both, but no luck.

AS A COMPLETE BEGINNER with Linux, I have downloaded and run both Ubuntu and Knoppix(5). Of the two, K seems to be more 'intuitive' during boot.

However, try as I may, neither will recognise/see my wifi. Is the fact that I have disabled SSID and MAC limited it the reason?

Getting Linux to "see" WiFi is a bit of a black art. It will work but easy it ain't. I got my Linux PC happily accessing my LAN via WiFi - using a PCMCIA WiFi card: the PC has two PCMCIA slots - leftover from an earlier Jeppesen/Garmin GPS card writing setup.

What I'd do is to make it as easy as possible for it - turn on DHCP and SSID and all the rest, then get it working, then tweak.

I've not tried lately - next time I have a spare evening (June looks promising) I'll put the Mepis Boot CD in the laptop and see what happens.

So I put the Mepis CD in the laptop, and switched it on, and ten minutes or less later, here it is connected to PPRuNe using Firefox with NO configuring or anything else needed! I call that pretty good.

It's using the wired LAN, though. The next step (back soon!) is to try the WLAN.

Edit: no, it can't see the PCMCIA or the USB wifi devices. I don't think WiFi is built into the boot CD.