Beginning to use Linux

Interested in learning to use Linux, never daballed with it before - heard so much on forums & stuff - very very intrigued!

 

Going to be using it for home use on a desktop machine - whats the best version to go with?

 

Why is there so many?

 

Mandriva

SUSE

Linspire

MEPIS

Fedora Core

Ubuntu

 

whats the main differences?

TBH, there's not a *lot* of difference. I would go with ubuntu, as it is fairly "complete", though i am sure Mandriva is also pretty good, used it myself for a long while.

Probably for "my first linux" ubuntu is the best option. Although of course there is also Edubuntu - http://www.edubuntu.org/.

 

Although I'm personally a Redhat/Fedora fan boy....

 

Cheers

Jona

Also remember there's a lot of Debian/Ubuntu folks on the forums here (including me) so you're more likely to get help if you stick with Debian or its derivatives.

There are so many because Linux itself is just the kernel - distributions are developed around the kernel with various different configurations, software packages and development methods.

 

I personally use Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu that uses the much-preferred KDE desktop environment instead of Gnome.

I'd say Ubuntu for a beginner, or mandriva - both are good (although I would personally say Mandriva is a little more unstable).

Either Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS 2007 are very good for beginners but it you are going to install it on a laptop I would say go for PCLinuxOS 2007 as it has very good wireless hardware detection and configuration. It is as far as I'm aware one the few distro's that allows you to configure your wireless whilst in LiveCD mode.

We use Fedora for clients and Redhat for servers

 

 

If you were using Linux at home I would say use Ubuntu but at school I've found Fedora is better if you want to have LDAP based authentication and user information etc.

 

So we have a Redhat ( but you could use Fedora ) LDAP server to do all login stuff and another Redhat server as a file server.

 

Works a treat

 

M