thelinuxlink.net

I have 2 noobie conversions coming up: My dad (newish low-end Dell desktop) and a co-workers teenage daughter(older Sony Vaio laptop). If the new version of Kanotix was out I'd install it on both machines in a heartbeat. It's not. So which distro would you recommend? More than likely I'll go with the new version of Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) or may even try <a href="http://www.ludos.org/portal/">Underground Desktop</a> which is a quick and easy way to install <a href="http://archlinux.org">Arch Linux</a>. What do you guys think?

I'm scheduled to go to a co-worker's house sometime between Christmas and New Years.

She wants to get rid of XP. She's "had enough" as she puts it. So I'm going to install Underground for her. It was a pretty simple install for me a couple days ago and everything has been working just great.

By the way, thanks for the tip on setting up automount, Pat. Super!

As long as you're going to set everything up for them, UD should be just fine. UD comes with Guzuta, which is a GUI front end for Pacman. I've just started playing with it today and it has a very Synaptic feel to it. So even installing and upgrading software should be pretty straight forward for Newbies.

I'd say go with (K)ubuntu if you're not going to be around to help them configure and setup their PC. Or maybe even PCLinuxOS

the motion of (K)Ubuntu

you have my curiosity up with arch - I am going to give it a try.

jsusanka wrote:you have my curiosity up with arch - I am going to give it a try.

Good for you I hope you like it as much as I do.

If you're not too enthusiastic about having to configure Xorg, KDE 3.5 and want to avoid some of the hoops in getting the 2.6 kernel installed, you may want to get the Underground Desktop ISO. It does a lot of the Arch setup automatically.

Let us know how you do.

Patrick wrote:So which distro would you recommend?

SuSE Linux 10.0, I've seen positive reviews ALL OVER the place, and I've been using it since it came out, rock solid KDE-centric desktop, nice GUI administration and installation... Also, when you pop on a digital camera (Kamera, get it?) it will pop up a box and ask if you want to bring of Konqueror to look at the pictures and neat stuff like that.

Something I was wondering about Pat, why in the world did you try SuSE Linux 10.1 Alpha instead of their pretty recent 10.0 stable release???

Tsuroerusu wrote:Also, when you pop on a digital camera (Kamera, get it?) it will pop up a box and ask if you want to bring of Konqueror to look at the pictures and neat stuff like that.

We can do that with Arch, too. Well, actually, it ain't a distro. feature, it's a KDE 3.5 feature.

Judland wrote:

Tsuroerusu wrote:Also, when you pop on a digital camera (Kamera, get it?) it will pop up a box and ask if you want to bring of Konqueror to look at the pictures and neat stuff like that.

We can do that with Arch, too. Well, actually, it ain't a distro. feature, it's a KDE 3.5 feature.

I know, but Arch isn't particular newbie friendly right?

My experience tells me that newbies will throw Linux right off their system if they find it too hard to use, or even if they find OpenOffice too hard to use.

Tsuroerusu wrote:I know, but Arch isn't particular newbie friendly right?

My experience tells me that newbies will throw Linux right off their system if they find it too hard to use, or even if they find OpenOffice too hard to use.

Arch is plenty newbie friendly (at least as friendly as a computer operating system can be) if it's set up by someone who knows how to do it, then hands the pre-configured PC over to said newbie.

The point I was making is that Arch is capable of this same "feature" of SuSE. The auto media detection is not specific to SuSE, but rather to KDE 3.5... so, again, any distro. using KDE 3.5 has all the same capabilities.

The way your post read, is seemed as if this feature was only available through SuSE... which it isn't. I was just trying to clarify.

Judland wrote:

Tsuroerusu wrote:I know, but Arch isn't particular newbie friendly right?

My experience tells me that newbies will throw Linux right off their system if they find it too hard to use, or even if they find OpenOffice too hard to use.

Arch is plenty newbie friendly (at least as friendly as a computer operating system can be) if it's set up by someone who knows how to do it, then hands the pre-configured PC over to said newbie.

The point I was making is that Arch is capable of this same "feature" of SuSE. The auto media detection is not specific to SuSE, but rather to KDE 3.5... so, again, any distro. using KDE 3.5 has all the same capabilities.

The way your post read, is seemed as if this feature was only available through SuSE... which it isn't. I was just trying to clarify.

Fair enough, but let me ask you, how easy is it for a newbie running Arch, set up by an advanced user of course, to update the system without using the commandline, install new software or change the system configuration?
SuSE can do all those things through the GUI, the last time I tried getting some people moved to Linux, they couldn't figure OpenOffice out so they went right back to Windows, and I doubt they will ever try Linux again.

Tsuroerusu wrote:Something I was wondering about Pat, why in the world did you try SuSE Linux 10.1 Alpha instead of their pretty recent 10.0 stable release???

Because I like the latest and greatest. I'll wait for the official 10.1 release to give it a proper review.

Patrick wrote:Because I like the latest and greatest. I'll wait for the official 10.1 release to give it a proper review.

Fair enough, I'm looking forward to hear your opinions

Personally I find SuSE and Mandriva very good for newbies, especially if they don't have an interest in computers or learning how the system works.

For the laptop I'm going with Kubuntu. Got it downloaded and ready to go. I'll probably do the install Thursday or Friday. I see the wireless card (Linksys WPC11v4 PCMCIA) is supported under ndiswrapper. This is my first experience with ndiswrapper. Should be fun.

Patrick wrote:For the laptop I'm going with Kubuntu. Got it downloaded and ready to go. I'll probably do the install Thursday or Friday. I see the wireless card (Linksys WPC11v4 PCMCIA) is supported under ndiswrapper. This is my first experience with ndiswrapper. Should be fun.

Here is what I use to choose distros. It works pretty well for me. I'd pimp my favorite distro like everyone else, but I don't think Fedora is as newbie friendly as some.

I did not have any luck with Kubuntu, but hopefully it will work for you. As far as ndiswrapper goes, it's not that hard. Just follow the instructions. I used it to get an unsupported wired ethernet card up and running on my laptop.

Gomer_X wrote:Here is what I use to choose distros. It works pretty well for me. I'd pimp my favorite distro like everyone else, but I don't think Fedora is as newbie friendly as some.

I did not have any luck with Kubuntu, but hopefully it will work for you. As far as ndiswrapper goes, it's not that hard. Just follow the instructions. I used it to get an unsupported wired ethernet card up and running on my laptop.

Yeah that distro selector is pretty neat
Not useful when it suggests you twelve distros though