tutnkmn's Profile

Another reason I would not recommend a Red Hat based syste (like Fedora) to beginners: The Red Hat Package Manager system. As you may find out as you continue with Fedora there are many different RPM packages. Some work with Fedora/Red Hat, others only with SuSE, others only with Mandriva, etc. RPMs can be confusing and frustrating at times. If you use only Red Hat PRM repositories you will likely be OK, but step outside this to download from third party sites and wow, what a mess things can become. This has been a point of contention with Linux users for years, the advantages of RH systems versus Debian systems. Although Debian out of the box is difficult to set up and use, the commercial distros are usually preconfigured and easy to manage. Most .deb files will work with any Debian system that has a compatible kernel. Hopefully I will not start a flame war by saying so, I believe RH systems are good and have their uses. I would simply reserve those systems (Red Hat based) for more advanced users. Fedora for instance, is a community project not really aimed at the beginner, but is used by Red Hat as a proving ground (a sort of beta version) for their corporate Red Hat Enterprise system. It has become popular amoung the Linux community especially software developers and beta testers because of its interoperability with the commerical Red Hat projects. A good system to be sure, but in my humble opinion as a 20 year plus IT veteran, not for beginners.

I really think Fedora is an OK system, but not the best system for a beginner to start with. Mepis and Xandros are the absolute best out of the box systems for beginners. Installation is fewer than 5 clicks for Xandros and about 8 clicks for Mepis. Mepis and Xandros both work better with older hardware also. We have in our center about 10 old machines (from Pentium II @ 233Mghz - 128MB RAM, through Celeron @ 400 Mghz - 398 MB RAM) and these two systems make these old machines act like they are in the 2.0 Ghz range. I do not know about the latest Fedora, but on earlier releases you could change the session type (Gnome/KDE) at the login splash screen with a drop down menu (i.e. "select session type" or some such thing) as mentioned by tobiax. I would also agree that the time of install problem would be related to CDROM speed and the read/write errors encountered may have been due to a dirty CDROM drive reader. I would suggest a CDROM cleaning and/or a newer faster drive (52X). Cheers.

Two of the easist distros around are Xandros, a "proprietary Linux" that cost $$ and Simply Mepis (free). Both are based on Debian, which is more stable than Red Hat systems. With the tweaks these two companies have done to their distros Debian becomes easy to use and figure out for a beginner. If coming from the M$ Windows environment start with Xandros OS. It is the most Windows like Linux on the market and software install is easy. Pay the money though and get the deluxe system, stay away from the free download. Simply Mepis is the best distro for those coming from Mac or other Linux systems. It comes on a live CD and installs from a live session. System installation is a pure joy with either system, Xandros will even set up dual boot with the NTFS. Mepis is a little more difficult to dual boot but they have great website support to answer any questions you may have. Again these systems are based on Debian but have wonderful graphical software installers (Xandros Networks and Synaptic for Mepis) and need very little if any command line work. All the confusion with a Debian installation is gone from these systems. You can even install RPM files with alien. Xandros Deluxe uses Crossover Wine to run Quicktime and Windows Media and Mepis is configured to run most media by having a plethora of codecs pre-installed in its media players for those who do a lot of movie watching (like me). Both systems come with Real Player 10 installed.