Red Hat 8.0 or Mandrake 9.0 for a noob to linux?

[kehi]

Please lmk what you think is the best. It will be used for web browsing, email, and typing papers. I need to have something like MS Word. Is that possible without being a huge pain? My biggest problem before was writing documents in linux and having someone else tryt to open them on a windows box with MS Word, which always resulted in problems. Thanks and please lmk what you think

 

[Mucho]

There are several threads on RH8 or Mandy9 recently this one might help here.

 

[NICKCARTER]

Try Suse 8.1!
I am a newbe in Linux and started it up first time one and a half week ago and i am very pleased with it.
I have never had a look at Linux earlier and i think Suse save the user from a lot of "starting headache".
Actually i use it now (i am also have win98se & xp installed)
The pro comes with a LOT of software ex open office that can achieve your requirement.
Good luck!

 

[n0cmonkey]

Debian.

 

[bromer]

Go with Gentoo or Debian. If you are going to switch to linux you might as well do it right the first time. Apps are easy to install with these to and with gentoo you get a nice sourcetree to.

If you find that you need a office tool there is OpenOffice you can download and install. There are a good installation description with it, so this should not be a problem. If you write big papers you should consider typesetting these in a LaTeX/TeX env. You can produce very nice documents this way and your workload will be with writting the paper, not typesetting it 🙂

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: bromer
If you write big papers you should consider typesetting these in a LaTeX/TeX env. You can produce very nice documents this way and your workload will be with writting the paper, not typesetting it 🙂

Sure, what better way to start with Linux? Debian and TeX!! 🙂 🙂 🙂

Yes, TeX produces beautiful pages. But recommending it to a self-proclaimed noob is a bit much, don't you think?