LINUX people! Read meeee!?

Question

So I just made a bet with my friend and he's putting up $100 that I format my "faggoty" windows XP and switch to a Linux distro of my choice for 31 days on my home machine. He's also not telling me A THING about linux period.

Thing is I've NEVER used an actual distro before and I don't know what to expect. Probably what I'll miss the most on windows is watching divX movies. I'm not much of a gamer - so that's a relief.

So do you have any advice on which distro I should choose? Or what can I expect in the world of linux in general? Anything? Anybody???

Answer 1

I would go with Ubuntu. It is a single CD which will get you up and running. It is pretty good at figuring out your configuration and getting all your hardware to work. You can then add on to it using Synaptic or apt-get to download programs from the Internet. It is based on the Debian distribution and it can run any of the Debian packages. Debian is a HUGE distribution with lots of support so there is almost nothing you can't run!



Once you get the desktop running look into a program called Synaptic Package Manager under your system->administration menu. It is a graphical front end for apt-get. Apt-get is sort of like Windows Update, but not only are there updates, there are thousands of other programs. Synaptic lets you browse them like a catalog. Pick what you want to install and it downloads and installs if for you.



For all the cool multimedia stuff someone has written a configurator called Automatix. Do a search for it on Google. It is sort of a blunt force install-all-this-cool-crap program. It has a nice list of things you will want to try out or use and saves you the time you would spend trying to find all these packages in the apt-get archives. It will give you video players, mp3 players, fonts, plug ins for Mozilla Fire fox...etc. It is a nice way to discover what is available. Way cool.



Most video plays better on Linux than Windows. Rather then needing a player for MPG/AVI, Quicktime for .MOV, and real player for .rm and .ram you can play them all on Mplayer. Just need to make sure you istall all the codecs.



Do a search for some Linux screen shots. The beauty of them is inspiring.



I started off with Redhat. Problem with a Redhat distro is that everything from the open standard has been tweaked by RedHat to the point that a lot of things just don't work right. I saw all these cool desktops, but those same apps didn't seem to run right under Redhat. The other caution I have against Redhat is with every release of FedoraCore it seems the availablity of packages for it gets slower and slower. Yum is slow and terrible. It is a really poor attempt to imitate apt-get. With Ubuntu stuff just works.



The other cool thing about Ubuntu is you can download a live CD version of it and try it out. In other words boot off of a CD into a working Linux desktop without touching your systems hard drive. Once you convinced it will work you can then go get the install CD and install it to your hard drive.

Answer 2

I would suggest Fedora Core 5. Why? Basically because of yum/kyum. It will make getting everything you'd ever want fast,easy, and non techincal. Suse is great for first timers other than there YAST(there imitation Yum) doesn't work well.



You can be watching DIVX movies in Linux in minutes by just going to FreshRpms website adding the rpm-releases which will and there software collection to yum then goto the console or use Kyum to install Xine or Mplayer.



Other great apps are Amarok(need gstreamer-ugly to play mps), Tons a games, Like froozen bubble, super tux, the Gimp is a good picture editor, KDE desktop is great, Gaim is a good IM program, ect



Linux with dual core new computer is alot of fun and very fast.

Answer 3

Use Fedora. It's a lot like windows, so you probably won't have much of a problem. Linux is a very terrible system that nothing is compatible with. It's a system for people with WAY too much time. Plug and play doesn't really exist on Linux as it does in the XP world, so you're going to have to learn to mount your drives. Good luck and switch back after 30 days!

Answer 4

I've always used Suse Linux Pro.

Mandriva pro versions are supposed to be excellent (I have only tried a small version and it was pretty good).

Fedora linux is pretty nice too.



WARN: Anyone can make a linux distibution, and so they do. Quality varies and some are very technically oriented (force you to use the shell/command line for everything).



All the big ones have a nice desktops and loads of crap on them (games, utilities, and so on).



Depending on what you do, it can be much better or a serious pain in the butt. For me, both.

Answer 5

You should try Fedora Core 4 (formerly Red Hat). Check out this site for some more details of multimedia functions.



Download Fedora 4 here:

http://fedora.redhat.com/download/



To setup your codecs check out the section about 'Xine' here:

http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_4_installation_notes.html



Good luck!

Answer 6

Go to http://www.linuxiso.org/

They have downloads and the forums will answer all of your questions.



You can watch DivX on Linux and do pretty much anything else.