Noobie Distro

[Azerthoth]

OK I used to recommend Ubuntu to everyone as a newbie distro.

That isnt the case anymore. PCLinuxOS 2007 release 1 is now my newbie distro of choice.

1: Wireless networking is much easier to deal with than in Ubuntu
2: nVidia drivers are 1000x easier in PCLOS to set up
3: Getting your DVD's playing takes all of 3 seconds
4: Beryl set up again takes only seconds to set up.

Being that PCLOS is still beta, there are lots of packages (programs) that arent available yet, so if your looking to back up you DVD collection *cough* Chase *cough* then you may have to wait a little while. However overall it is rock solid and so newbie friendly it sets a bar that Ubuntu could only pray to obtain one day.

If your new to linux give PCLinuxOS a try.

[Schmoe]

Hello, I am new to the forum, and from Ogame, but Ironically this is a forum I am in need of!

I just ordered a spare HD and a few other things from newegg to get my first Linux box up and running.

your post here answered 1 major question, wireless networking, without getting into details, I have to use wireless because my internet connection is actually my neighbors, as he is letting me piggyback until my personal finances get in order.

anyway, a few n00b questions if you don't mind for now, and I will watch / read this forum for more answers in the future.

the box I am setting up was in my closet, and unused. It is an Athlon 1GHZ processor on an ASUS A7VI-VM motherboard. It has 256MB of RAM, and CD ROM, a floppy drive, and I will be using a Gforce MX-200 video card (remember this was sitting in my closet lol)

I will be using a KVM switch I have, and am looking forward to playing around with this.

Is there anything glaring that will be a problem with this system so far? do you have a link for the OS you recommended above? I have never even used a linux system before, but have MCP and A+ and network+ certs, so I am not totally technically challenged, but is there any quick advise, or things I should know before jumping into this?


thanks a ton! and will keep going on this.

[Azerthoth]

http://www.pclinuxos.com

I dont see anything glaring about that configuration, although you might want to do a little research on that video card. If you have any specific questions just feel free to ask.

[$chase$]

the forums at pclinuxos. are a MAJOR help. there pretty friendly to

[Umpa]

Hello, I am new to the forum, and from Ogame, but Ironically this is a forum I am in need of!

I just ordered a spare HD and a few other things from newegg to get my first Linux box up and running.

your post here answered 1 major question, wireless networking, without getting into details, I have to use wireless because my internet connection is actually my neighbors, as he is letting me piggyback until my personal finances get in order.

anyway, a few n00b questions if you don't mind for now, and I will watch / read this forum for more answers in the future.

the box I am setting up was in my closet, and unused. It is an Athlon 1GHZ processor on an ASUS A7VI-VM motherboard. It has 256MB of RAM, and CD ROM, a floppy drive, and I will be using a Gforce MX-200 video card (remember this was sitting in my closet lol)

I will be using a KVM switch I have, and am looking forward to playing around with this.

Is there anything glaring that will be a problem with this system so far? do you have a link for the OS you recommended above? I have never even used a linux system before, but have MCP and A+ and network+ certs, so I am not totally technically challenged, but is there any quick advise, or things I should know before jumping into this?


thanks a ton! and will keep going on this.

After using Linux for 11 years, and having used it as my primary OS for 7, I had a lot of issues with most distributions. After much thought, usage, trial and error, I have concluded at this point in time Fedora 6 is probably your best bet for a desktop and server.

I say this for a couple reasons.

1) Everything you learn using it you can potentially use in a job, or at least people you talk to will know how to relate your issue because Fedora is what Redhat will be distributing in 6 months.
2) If you stay on the latest Fedora version you will be on the cutting edge, and things that you will really want to use, will almost always compile or run there.
3) Red hat Package manager is the most used package distribution product for Linux, and packages created using this even on other distributions will more then likely work on fedora without to much of a headache. Or at least you can get the src rpm and recompile it without being marginalized into a smaller set of updates.
4) Yes I say compiling a program, but in the end I find myself with less and less time to spend tinkering on the OS and I just want things to work. With Fedora I can watch CNN videos, utube, mtv, and almost all video media via firefox without much issue. Updates are automatic using yum update -y.
5) ALSA the primary sound engine for Linux works correctly on Fedora for everything, I run my NWN client on Linux using ALSA with mp3's playing the background and have no issue, I didnt have to create a fancy mixer .asoundrc to make this happen either, just point SDL to alsa. Teamspeak will not use alsa without some grief and I have stopped using it because of the lack of updates in the last 5 years, I have currently moved to Mumble. It works on windows and linux, there is not distro for it yet, but I did post how to compile it on fedora in the mumble forums.

I have in the last 6 months converted several people to Fedora 6 once they saw my desktop in action, MS MCSE"s and Other Linux/Unix Admins. It just works for what I want, and it still has all the bells and whistles to play with as I need them. I am using Linux at the moment and use it all day at work and home.

If you set up Fedora 6 there are a couple of great fedora setup walkthroughs on the internet, just google for Fedora 6 setup video.

Everyone has thier Favorite Distro for linux. They are almost like belly buttons at this stage, I just know what I have gone through and I have not met many people that have actually used the OS more then I

[DM Vapor]

I've tinkered with FC5.. I was sorely displeased. The installation hung atleast 5 times, requiring a format and reinstall each time. After I finally got it to install, I kept getting fatal errors. Again, format and reinstall, only to have it hang again and again.

After I finally got it installed and it didn't give me fatal errors, it ran excellent - for the two days it actually worked. It started lagging HORRIBLY in GUI mode. After that, the mouse stopped responding. Then, the keyboard. Then, it would boot up, load the GUI, and sit at a blank screen, with no login or anything.

I finally said screw it, and grabbed Ubuntu. I curse myself that I have to use it instead of FC (FC has way more potential, that's for sure), but I've found Ubuntu works a lot better, and their forums/documentation are alot more informative.

Just my two cents.

[Kyle Ironbane]

OK I used to recommend Ubuntu to everyone as a newbie distro.

That isnt the case anymore. PCLinuxOS 2007 release 1 is now my newbie distro of choice.

1: Wireless networking is much easier to deal with than in Ubuntu
2: nVidia drivers are 1000x easier in PCLOS to set up
3: Getting your DVD's playing takes all of 3 seconds
4: Beryl set up again takes only seconds to set up.

/snipped

Exactly what problems did you have installing the nVidia drivers in Ubuntu that PCLOS is 1000x easier? And which version of Ubuntu were you referring to?

I've gone from Breezy Badger to Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft without having a single issue in installing the drivers. The only way it could have been any easier is if the Universe and Multiverse repositories were enabled by default. I don't remember which one contained the drivers.

Haven't really dealt with the other three items. What package manager is PCLOS using?

[Umpa]

I've tinkered with FC5.. I was sorely displeased. The installation hung atleast 5 times, requiring a format and reinstall each time. After I finally got it to install, I kept getting fatal errors. Again, format and reinstall, only to have it hang again and again.

After I finally got it installed and it didn't give me fatal errors, it ran excellent - for the two days it actually worked. It started lagging HORRIBLY in GUI mode. After that, the mouse stopped responding. Then, the keyboard. Then, it would boot up, load the GUI, and sit at a blank screen, with no login or anything.

I finally said screw it, and grabbed Ubuntu. I curse myself that I have to use it instead of FC (FC has way more potential, that's for sure), but I've found Ubuntu works a lot better, and their forums/documentation are alot more informative.

Just my two cents.

I had several issues with FC5, originally the Nvidia and ATI driver support was very poor and caused many issues for everyone. Alt-CTL-F1 gets you the console and F7 goes back to gui if you have issue with graphics hang and stuff there.

FC6 has worked on all my asus systems and dells without a flaw, other then I did pick up a package from freshrpm versus lvina, which caused me a bit of headache on playback of ape and mp3 files with mplayer. But once I actually figured out the upgrade from scratch non DVD via Yum to FC6 caused it to pick the first package that matched the number and my having both repos in the config caused my issue. It was tough to sort out, but it was FC4 to FC6 upgrade. VIDEO drivers from livna is the key to making FC5 and 6 work correctly on initial install.

There is not offical support for the product, since its the free version of redhat's future release. I find google to be the best support for any distro either way. The other Unix admin here also had very bad issues with 1/2 and I had 1 and we both agreed they were terrible, if you get a chance try FC6 again, add livna repos, and try it. I've been utterly stunned at how well it integrates and performs now compared to my older desktops and XP.

[Kyle Ironbane]

The following are simply my observations. It goes without saying that if use of a particular distribution works for you, it's a very good thing. Linux and open source is all about freedom, after all. Freedom to choose what works for us being one of those freedoms.

After using Linux for 11 years, and having used it as my primary OS for 7, I had a lot of issues with most distributions. After much thought, usage, trial and error, I have concluded at this point in time Fedora 6 is probably your best bet for a desktop and server.

If you're used to RHEL already or are preparing for a job using RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux for those who don't know), I might agree on the server side. I can't recommend it on the desktop side though for reasons I'll outline below.

I say this for a couple reasons.

1) Everything you learn using it you can potentially use in a job, or at least people you talk to will know how to relate your issue because Fedora is what Redhat will be distributing in 6 months.

The fact that Fedora is pretty much an open beta test for RHEL is a positive and negative thing. The positive is it tends to be somewhat bleeding edge with the latest and greatest features. The negative is it tends to be somewhat bleeding edge with some of the latest and greatest bugs. In any case, other than becoming intimately familiar with RPM, I don't think Fedora holds that much of an advantage in dealing with RHEL over any other distro that follows the LSB (Linux Standards Base). Even then, package management for RHEL is more likely to be through up2date vs. using yum for Fedora.

2) If you stay on the latest Fedora version you will be on the cutting edge, and things that you will really want to use, will almost always compile or run there.

Covered in response to #1.

3) Red hat Package manager is the most used package distribution product for Linux, and packages created using this even on other distributions will more then likely work on fedora without to much of a headache. Or at least you can get the src rpm and recompile it without being marginalized into a smaller set of updates.

RPM also tends to be one of the more reviled package managers out there. Management of RPM via yum or up2date has improved matters, but I'd still take Debian style package management via apt-get over it any time for the purposes of avoiding Dependency Hell. The repositories with DEB packages have just about everything you could ever want.

4) Yes I say compiling a program, but in the end I find myself with less and less time to spend tinkering on the OS and I just want things to work. With Fedora I can watch CNN videos, utube, mtv, and almost all video media via firefox without much issue. Updates are automatic using yum update -y.

I can't agree with this at all. Fedora is one of the most time consuming of the distros to get up and running with everything you need due to the maintainers taking more of a hardline FLOSS stance. It's trivial in Ubuntu to enable repositories with proprietary drivers/codecs/software for when a suitable FREE (as in libre) component is not available. The irony is that Fedora is more like Debian in that regard than Ubuntu which is built upon Debian.

5) ALSA the primary sound engine for Linux works correctly on Fedora for everything, I run my NWN client on Linux using ALSA with mp3's playing the background and have no issue, I didnt have to create a fancy mixer .asoundrc to make this happen either, just point SDL to alsa. Teamspeak will not use alsa without some grief and I have stopped using it because of the lack of updates in the last 5 years, I have currently moved to Mumble. It works on windows and linux, there is not distro for it yet, but I did post how to compile it on fedora in the mumble forums.

I have been running NWN on Ubuntu since Breezy Badger without any issue using my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card. I've never had to do any special configuration to get it to work under ALSA. Never had much use for Teamspeak so I can't speak to that (no pun intended).

I have in the last 6 months converted several people to Fedora 6 once they saw my desktop in action, MS MCSE"s and Other Linux/Unix Admins. It just works for what I want, and it still has all the bells and whistles to play with as I need them. I am using Linux at the moment and use it all day at work and home.

It is a beautiful thing. Right now, I have Ubuntu and Kubuntu on two machines just so I can get used to the differences between Gnome and KDE without having to have both on the same machine. I'm loving it.

If you set up Fedora 6 there are a couple of great fedora setup walkthroughs on the internet, just google for Fedora 6 setup video.

One of my biggest beefs with Fedora has been issues I've had with upgrading from one core release to the next. How have you been handling it and have you had any issues? I have to say that going from one release of Ubuntu to the next has been the easiest I've experienced in any of the distributions I've used.

[cely]

I agree w/ Kyle Ironbane. I've used debian and more recently ubuntu as my desktop at work for the last 7 years. At home, I've hopped between slackware, caldera, suse, redhat, mandrake, openbsd, freebsd, debian, mepis, ubuntu, pclinuxos (briefly) and now back to ubuntu.

I've had my fair share of rpm problems and prefer the freebsd package management system which seems to mimic debian's apt package management system. So I've been pretty happy with apt on ubuntu. And with Automatix (yes I know some people complain about Automatix), it's trivial to get proprietary stuff setup.

[Umpa]

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Fedora_FC6 will show you pretty much everything you need to get started.

No distribution is painless, try getting the latest java plugins working, or flash installed, or the latest ATI/NVidia drivers in place, tested, and xorg.conf to keep you dual head views or XEIV settings. Have you upgraded all 6 times ATI released updates in the last couple months? Lose your 7 button mouse settings? Upgrades are tougher then new installs many times because there are things you have tricked out and installed, that will NOT be in the upgrade, and most people do not document their fixes very well, or are even confused about what actually they fixed. My biggest [censored] is the sound support for multichannel mixing. I use the built in soundcard on and asus board at home and it all works great, 7.1. At this point its as functional for multi application use as Windows is for the gamer and normal user.

When I reffered to the RPM as in used in redhat, I was not reffering to yum, even though I really like yum a great deal more then the up2date processes that the commercial version uses. You can do some interesting things with YUM I really like over other products, but thats not the issue really. Most unix interviews will consist if its covering linux, questions about RPM packages and such, what tools you download with are really not a big deal, such as my company I wrote my own, and we use it on all servers, AIX, HP, LINUX, Tru64, and SUN. It uses CPIO and compress which is everywhere out of the box pretty much. Debian still messes up dependencies, try updating to a latest beta version of speex then update some dependent packages. yum list >yum.list then look at that list to find package issue. yumex is a very nice python gui for yum.

Non of the package managers do very well really if you want to talk about it, non of them do proper repair of all files in case of massive file corruption. I once rsynced to the wrong box and overwrote via the /opt/kde directory FC5 with FC6 files, all of my base libs and executables cored full time. I had to write my own perl scripts to resolve the file repairs. Lots of fun there. Nobody has a solution for something like that.

The thing is Fedora 1-5 got marginally better, but 6 really put it over the top for multimedia that workes every time. If you have video issues, or library issues I'd be supprised if you followed the livna setup. My laptop has 205 processes running in dualhead mode, playing mp3's from encrypted disks and USB pen among other things. I had issues getting all this working while I was watching CNN videos in FC5, 6 was almost painless, and it worked.

I am pointing out, that FC6 has finally made it to a decent desktop status, no its not utter newbie ware, but its almost painless if you follow a good setup guide, you can cut and paste your way to almost all the funtionality at this point. My normal assumptions when someone installs it, is they have a browser, can read, and type in commands to setup something in a terminal.

I have never recommended gnome for anything but maintenance, KDE all the way for everyone. KDE understands that most people know windows but not LINUX, also GNOME assumes people are stupid and dangerous so lock all the fun stuff down or doesn't show it, Linus has actually submitted a bunch of patches to get them started a month ago.

If you run NWN in linux and haven't changed any settings then its locking your soundcard, try running it and say mplayer or xmms at the same time. Your not mixing channels unless you put the alsa settings in your NWN start script to use ALSA, and your SDL needs to support it. By default the original script for running nwn doesnt' do this, so SDL takes ownership of the /dev/dsp. All of the programs you would want to run would need to support ALSA also, which most on FC6 do at this point.

I did point out that most people have their favorites when it comes to Distro's of Linux. I do actually work on this stuff full time, and I have switched every linux server we have at this point to FC6 and everyone I know with a desktop is now using it that about 10 people to date. Try it, use a setup guide that includes the video in fedora setups, then compare it to others trying to run the same things such as CNN videos.

Even though I included servers perhaps in the text, what I'm reffering to is LINUX desktop usage only. Everyone already pretty much knows how it acts as a server.

Non of the above applies to the 64bit mode linux, since firefox doesn't really support itself really well in 64bit mode, which will mean you have to run in 32bit mode, and do some wrappers, there is a good page somewhere on the net for this which I've used for the one machine here we have as a 64bit desktop. Otherwise it works well with nvidia drivers, I haven't tried ATI there yet.

[Kyle Ironbane]

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Fedora_FC6 will show you pretty much everything you need to get started.

Good looking wiki. I'll have to bookmark that in case anyone I know decides to use Fedora.

No distribution is painless, try getting the latest java plugins working, or flash installed, or the latest ATI/NVidia drivers in place, tested, and xorg.conf to keep you dual head views or XEIV settings. Have you upgraded all 6 times ATI released updates in the last couple months? Lose your 7 button mouse settings? Upgrades are tougher then new installs many times because there are things you have tricked out and installed, that will NOT be in the upgrade, and most people do not document their fixes very well, or are even confused about what actually they fixed. My biggest [censored] is the sound support for multichannel mixing. I use the built in soundcard on and asus board at home and it all works great, 7.1. At this point its as functional for multi application use as Windows is for the gamer and normal user.

Every distribution is going to have its quirks, some more painful than others. Thus far, Ubuntu has proven to be the easiest in my experience which includes Fedora, OpenSuse, Slackware, Gentoo, White Box, CentOS, Mandrake (pre-Mandriva days). I probably shouldn't even include Gentoo due to the upgrade path being so drastically different from the others.

I've had no problems at all upgrading the Nvidia drivers in Ubuntu. I have never had to do any reconfiguration of Nvidia card after the upgrades either. I've not owned an ATI card that required the closed drivers so I couldn't comment as to that.

I haven't had any problems with my 5 button mouse either, though when I have an update to X, I always make a copy of the conf file just in case. My sound card, which still isn't perfectly supported in ALSA (darn you, Turtle Beach / Voyetra) needs no reconfiguration after kernel upgrades.

Re-configuration issues and upgrade issues are a large part of why I stopped using both Fedora and OpenSuse. Using YAST and SAX during the Nvidia driver update is a major pain. Once I saw how easy it was in Ubuntu, I was hooked.

When I reffered to the RPM as in used in redhat, I was not reffering to yum, even though I really like yum a great deal more then the up2date processes that the commercial version uses. You can do some interesting things with YUM I really like over other products, but thats not the issue really. Most unix interviews will consist if its covering linux, questions about RPM packages and such, what tools you download with are really not a big deal, such as my company I wrote my own, and we use it on all servers, AIX, HP, LINUX, Tru64, and SUN. It uses CPIO and compress which is everywhere out of the box pretty much. Debian still messes up dependencies, try updating to a latest beta version of speex then update some dependent packages. yum list >yum.list then look at that list to find package issue. yumex is a very nice python gui for yum.

The keyword in your Debian story is the fact that you were updating to a *beta* version of an application. If you were running Debian-stable, I would have been surprised if you *didn't* have dependency issues.

I've yet to have an interview regarding a *NIX related position where a crucial part of the interview dealt with knowing the ins and outs of RPM. Now, if I didn't know how to use the "man" command to get the information I needed on RPM switches, that would be more of a problem. RPM, like any package management system, is a tool. If you have shown the ability to use a similar tool, that's good enough in 90% of the cases.

Non of the package managers do very well really if you want to talk about it, non of them do proper repair of all files in case of massive file corruption. I once rsynced to the wrong box and overwrote via the /opt/kde directory FC5 with FC6 files, all of my base libs and executables cored full time. I had to write my own perl scripts to resolve the file repairs. Lots of fun there. Nobody has a solution for something like that.

True. It is one of the dangers of any *NIX type OS. If you have the rights to a particular directory, you can really screw things up if you're not careful. And the system isn't going to stop you either. That's why I thought the CEO of Linspire was being rather dense in his insistence that running as root from the beginning was not a bad thing for new users. In fact, it's probably the worst.

The thing is Fedora 1-5 got marginally better, but 6 really put it over the top for multimedia that workes every time. If you have video issues, or library issues I'd be supprised if you followed the livna setup. My laptop has 205 processes running in dualhead mode, playing mp3's from encrypted disks and USB pen among other things. I had issues getting all this working while I was watching CNN videos in FC5, 6 was almost painless, and it worked.

It appears that livna serves the same function for Fedora that the universe and multiverse repositories serve for Ubuntu. The real difference being that I didn't have to manually add those to repositories to Ubuntu, all I had to do was activate them.

I am pointing out, that FC6 has finally made it to a decent desktop status, no its not utter newbie ware, but its almost painless if you follow a good setup guide, you can cut and paste your way to almost all the funtionality at this point. My normal assumptions when someone installs it, is they have a browser, can read, and type in commands to setup something in a terminal.

I refuse to bother with any distro that doesn't have good online documentation, so I'm with you there. I've found that I still use the Gentoo guides when troubleshooting issues long after I had stopped using the distro. They are among the best I've ever seen.

I have never recommended gnome for anything but maintenance, KDE all the way for everyone. KDE understands that most people know windows but not LINUX, also GNOME assumes people are stupid and dangerous so lock all the fun stuff down or doesn't show it, Linus has actually submitted a bunch of patches to get them started a month ago.

I read the thread where Linus ripped into the GNOME maintainers. I see you agree with him lockstep on that. While there is some validity to his arguments, I think he was way over the top as are you in saying that GNOME assumes people are stupid. They assume no such thing. GNOME is simply aimed at a different segment than KDE is. For better or worse, GNOME is aimed at the corporate desktop/server segment. They've obviously tried to cut down administrative nightmares by limiting how easily a user can drastically change their desktop. KDE has more of an "everything and the kitchen sink" mentality. I'm currently using both on different machines. There are things I like about both. There are things I dislike about both. In the end, each one is a tool, each meant for a different purpose.

If you run NWN in linux and haven't changed any settings then its locking your soundcard, try running it and say mplayer or xmms at the same time. Your not mixing channels unless you put the alsa settings in your NWN start script to use ALSA, and your SDL needs to support it. By default the original script for running nwn doesnt' do this, so SDL takes ownership of the /dev/dsp. All of the programs you would want to run would need to support ALSA also, which most on FC6 do at this point.

And why would I be using xmms or mplayer at the same time I'm running NWN? I want every CPU cycle, every GPU cycle, and every bit of RAM dedicated to running NWN as quick as possible. If I wanted to listen to tunes at the same time, I'll either do it from my other machine or pop in a CD.

I did point out that most people have their favorites when it comes to Distro's of Linux. I do actually work on this stuff full time, and I have switched every linux server we have at this point to FC6 and everyone I know with a desktop is now using it that about 10 people to date. Try it, use a setup guide that includes the video in fedora setups, then compare it to others trying to run the same things such as CNN videos.

I believe that you do work on this stuff full time. I've done it full time. I now do it purely in my free time. I might consider trying Fedora again if there was something Ubuntu or Kubuntu didn't let me do easily. Getting CNN videos working was simple enough. The Ubuntu help docs have a section specifically devoted to Restricted Formats. The install was a simple copy/paste of 3 commands and I was done.

Even though I included servers perhaps in the text, what I'm reffering to is LINUX desktop usage only. Everyone already pretty much knows how it acts as a server.

My big gripe with using Fedora as a server is the fact that I'm not into bleeding edge on the server side. Stability is a heck of a lot more important than having all the newest features. There's also the problem of how relatively short the Fedora Core lifecycle is. Give me Ubuntu Dapper Drake LTS (Long Term Support) any day.

Non of the above applies to the 64bit mode linux, since firefox doesn't really support itself really well in 64bit mode, which will mean you have to run in 32bit mode, and do some wrappers, there is a good page somewhere on the net for this which I've used for the one machine here we have as a 64bit desktop. Otherwise it works well with nvidia drivers, I haven't tried ATI there yet.

I'll be a happy man when I have to deal with the 64 bit side of things as this will mean I've finally moved up to a 64 bit processor. Woohoo!

[VagaStorm]

I'm going to share my thoughts on what is a good beginning distro. I am a RHCE on RHEL wich used to be the highest sertification they gave at the time, so I can complile my packages if needed and it hapens from time to time that it is.... Atlest on my servers runing RHEL or CentOS (open source recompile of RHEL) But no users should ever have to do that as it can be wery choppy....

Debian is great in the way that they have removed the problem with dependencies, wich where hell when I first started using RedHat, but with yum that is not so much of a problem any more. But to install debian if you have no linux experience b4 hand, just dont...

Ubuntu is wery nice if you need nothing more than what coms on the first disk, but ubuntu is to Open source, and will not include ANYTHUING not fully GPLed.

CentOS/RedHat is usualy decently simple to nistall and stable for a server. But even tho thats what I'm trained with, I never recomend it on desktops, not becaus it dosent work, but it's not as user friendly, somehow, as I think it should be...

Knopix is wery nice. It dosent look the best right out of the box, but the fact that the last time I tried it, I could just insert the disk and evry thing workd was kinda nice.... Even wine workd so that I could just click win executabels and they worked right away. It can also be instaled so ya dont have to run it from a cd all the time...

OpenSuse was a revelation the first time I used it. It's not that its so much better than anything, but it is about as simple as Ubuntu to install, has more software if needed, and ading more is not wery hard. It is also wery stable, atleast if you dont install anything not beta(I ofcource dos that :p ) It is also posible to instal a package manager that can work with diffrent respitorys(deb, yast and yum atlest) Wich will give you access to almost evrything you need. Botom line is that unless the novel/MS deal totaly messes this up, wich I severly doubdt, I think it will stay the best distro both for beginners and more advanced users :p

[$chase$]

ummm the pclinuxos works pretty much right form install..and is the easiest i have seen to set up...

[Azerthoth]

Um, the only reason Ubuntu isnt shipping with the proprietary video drivers for the next release is that according to them Beryl isnt stable enough to be shipped as default. *buntu is rapidly moving in the direction of least likely to pay attention to FL/OSS unlike its parent Debian that is one of the most rabid followers.

As for nVidia in PCLinuxOS. All it takes to install is clicking one check mark. No command line, no repo's, no worries about maybe borking your xorg.conf. Trust me when I say that when I would hang out in Ubuntu's IRC channel to help out with tech support a good 60% of the issues were helping people get nVidia drivers working or fixing borked xorg.conf files.

Although 'echo "nvidia" >> /etc/modules' usually fixed things right up.