Re: starting the linux

Marlock wrote:

> Which one to take?

Selecting distribution has much to do what you want to do and what you do expect from your system, as this will be really difficult for everyone else than you to know, it will impossible to tell you which distribution would be the right one for you.

I would suggest you read a little bit about as many distributions as possible, a good source is www.dirstrowatch.com and try LiveCD versions of different distributions which sounds like interesting ones.

Don't listen too much what people tells you about the best distribution, you will get almost as many as there are people posting in this thread, check things up as much as possible and test those LiveCDs and you will get your own opinion and you will find a distribution you like instead of getting disappointed for you picked something that didn't really fit you, but someone else.


> What to be careful about?

If dual booting, see to have a full installation of microsoft before you install Linux or any other operating system, as microsoft been evil and decided that it should be the only operating system installed, so it by default will write over any other boot loader, no matter if the boot loader do allow booting microsoft.


> What about hardware support?

There is more hardware supported in a Linux distribution than in microsoft, but the major problem is that manufacturers aren't always good on sharing needed information to build a driver, so it can take longer before a hardware is supported, or if the user base for some hardware is too small, then there is a risk there will not be a driver.
In general most stuff is supported, wlan, winmodems and webcams are those hardwares that may not be well supported. The majority of distributions do offer a search engine or a list of supported hardware, take a look at the distributions homepage.


> What about the software that comes with the distribution?

This depends on the type of installation you make, server distributions won't have the eye candy tools, it will just have what is needed for running the services.
A distribution usually comes with 1000+ packages and more and if the distribution uses an online repository, then the total amount of packages can be well over 10000.
At distrowatch.com you can find some information about the most common programs and versions, while on the distributions homepage you will usually find more information.

--

//Aho
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