Want to try Linux

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Howdy all, I setup XP Pro on Microsoft's VM 2007, and it turned out to work really well, now I can still piddle with XP while studying for my A+ running on my Vista machine. My question is what would be the best Linux distro to start to get a feel for how Linux works and which distro is usually seen used in the real world? I'm thinking about running a VM of it and just piddling to teach myself a little here and there.

 

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The obvious choice for anyone new to Linux is Ubuntu. As you are into IT anyway though I would recommend openSUSE 11.1 as it is still simple enough to grasp without holding your hand too much with wizards etc.

Works like a charm out of the box and is very stable (I run it on one old laptop and in a VM on my work laptop).

A couple of good articles to get started

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/the_beginners_guide_linux_part_1_finding_right_distribution

http://www.tuxradar.com/linuxstarterpack

Hope this helps

 

sound advice from metalstar. Only thing I would say is if you do end up leaning towards Linux support it'll most likely be Redhat enterprise linux you encounter. The closest to this is Centos which is basically RHEL without branding and support (you pay for RHEL and support).

Play with ubuntu to get a feel for it. Maybe even make it your main os for a while but dont get to hung up on the gui aspect (especially stuff like compiz, pretty but not essential to learning) as most linux engineers do their work from the command line and even at home you'll find yourself working in the terminal most times

Good luck

 

Fedora's still closely linked with Red Hat (As is CentOS), so that might be a good idea. My worry though in using OSes like Ubuntu and Fedora is that you'll get too dependant on their GUIs. Unless you have a go at Ubuntu Server, which is installed without a GUI. You can muddle through with it, and then the process of installing a Window manager and configuring X will help get you into the Linux way of thinking.

I started with Linux on an old 386 laptop, and a floppy based version of Linux. I forget which distro though. Also, a handy link for you: Distrowatch. They list (And keep up to date) all of the hundreds of Distros out there. Quite handy for comparing features and version of bundled software.

 

use Gentoo
Like all good Linux padawans

 

Well I started downloading Fedora 10 on my laptop and it's going to take a couple of days because I have a garbage ISP that offers UPTO 10Mb/s while in all reality it's usually at around 8-12Kb/s. So hopefully in a few days I'll have a nice new VM running Fedora 10 that I can play with.