Re: Newbie Question

On Tue, 27 Feb 2007 02:25:57 GMT, Pete wrote:
I am learning really to dislike Micro$haft.
Would like to move toward Linux. What is the absolute easiest distro to use?
Mandriva Linux comes with a firewall out of the box.
That lets you play without letting anyone in.

See if you understand the install screens.
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_mandriva_2007
Other linux screens shots found at bottom of articles.

Page 2 has the package selection screen
I load everything but LSB and just pick KDE and GNOME for desktop managers.
Do go through the Summary section and check everything and set the firewall.
I answer no to start GUI on boot just incase there are video setup
problems. After login, startx will fireup your gui desktop manager.
You can use the Mandriva Control Center to start gui on boot later.

Larger screen shots found here
http://doc.mandrivalinux.com/MandrakeLinux/101/en/Starter.html/drakx.html

http://www.mandriva.com/en/download/free has download mirrors at bottom.

I recommend mandriva-free-2007-CD*.i586. iso and asc files or dvd.
I do not recommend the 84_64 bit media/installs if you have a 64 bit cpu.

You can download/burn this iso
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828
and use it to shrink your windows partition after defrag. Use it to create
about 11 gigs of install space. You click on the new free/unformated
space and create a 512 megbyte swap partition, then click the
free/unformated partition again and format it ext3.

Now you are ready to insert media and install a linux distribution of
your choice.
During install you pick custom/manual during partition phase, click
the 10 gig partition and mount it as /
Then you continue with the install.

Be sure to do a image burn. Do not just drag iso to cdrom. :(
When you download iso image/files always do a checksum check before burning.

You use md5sum or sha1sum depending on which checksum file you use.

ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt/binary/sha1sum.exe
http://etree.org/md5com.html


For other distributions there is
http://www.distrowatch.com

You may want to think about the Usenet newsgroups for when you want help when
making your distro selection.

Do read http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html before posting.

Please bookmark the following, very large,
Frequently Asked Questions (faq) Search engine:

http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search
key word(s) in the first box
*linux* in Newsgroup box. You need to use the two
asterisks around linux, pick English

If you want/need more control over the first box search,
http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html
.

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