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What's the best Linux distro for beginners?

W

Wadded Beef

Banned
want to run a dual boot: win xp & some type of linux. I've had problems installing the following distros...SUSE, Makdrake, Knoppix, and freeBSD. think it might be one of my ram sticks...prime95 errors after about 3 hours give or take. is linux really sensitive to flakey ram? windows runs fine.
 
I'm a newb and started with Mandrake, it fvcked itself over within 2 days, or maybe it was me, but I just installed Fedora Core 3 today and I must say I like it a lot. When I get more comfortable with it I think I'll switch to using it for 50% of the time. Can't switch completely because I still need Windows for several things. FC 3's instal was very painless as well.
 
Yes, run Memtest86 on your system.

If you have flacky memory your just going to have to replace it, as to which OS is more sensitive... I have to say it's pretty much dumb luck. Depends were the error is on the memory and if the OS just happens to use that section of RAM more then another one, then it'll be flaky.

You can apply patches like Badram or badmem to Linux to have it avoid bad sections of ram, but it's not realy worth your time to do that. Just fix your computer, it's much more better way of doing things.
 
MEPIS is very good for beginners. It provides all the drivers and plugins needed to replace Windows XP. The only problem I had was Firefox's tendency to crash with a segmentation fault everytime I visited a multimedia heavy site.
 
Originally posted by: agnitrate
Are you overclocking at all? Try running memtest and see how that fares.
Click to expand...

yea im overclocking but not a lot, stock is 166 fsb and im at 180. memtest will usually go for 15 hours before it errors. btw i'm using all 3 memory slots on my asus a7n8x-x nforce2 board, could this be the cause of errors?
 
I like both MEPIS and PCLinuxOS, and both were extremely easy to install. I finally settled on PCLinuxOS over MEPIS on my laptop.
 
On a AMD64 board I built had restrictions on what slots I could use.

I could use slots 1 and 2 for 400mhz memory (in DDR mode, of course). I could use slots 1, 2, or 3 for 333mhz speed. Originally I had problems with it because I didn't realise this restrictions (reminded me of pentium 1 days) and it caused severe problems.

The memory wasnt' well matched to the board anyways, which was my mistake. I should of used only 'approved' and tested memory types. Had to underclock the RAM to 333mhz anyways to get it stable.

Memtest86 should run for days, weeks, years, without any errors... pretty much.
 
I don't know if Linux is, per se, more or less sensitive than Windows; but the differences between the way the systems are used often makes you notice bad RAM more in Linux. Compiling, for example, usually brings bad RAM right to your attention. As most Windows boxes have never compiled so much as a line of code, while most Linux systems will at one time or another, this makes the Linux experience effectively more sensitive. Generally, though, you just don't want to mess around with bad RAM. It will make your life more dfficult.
 
I would say go with a Redhat distro, FC3 is nice (I hear, never used it myself). Suse isn't too bad. The Suse Distro of Novell Linux Destop is nice, if you can snag a copy somewhere.


I started on RH9, and moved to Gentoo. Actually, I tried gentoo first, but got it installed and wondered "What do I do now?" RH is much more user friendly for newbies imho
 
Any known instabilities in your system should throw up any red flags. As said, it's dumb luck that Windows doesn't randomly crash or die on you. Especially when you have any memtest errors, but that's most likely because of instabilities of your overclocked CPU.

Suse or Fedora Core 3 would be a good distribution to start with.
 
Don't waste time with Gentoo. I agree PCLinuxOS is the easiest OS ever to install, including windows. Period. But it's a very restrictive system - it's hard to get good tools for it to do more advanced stuff. Ubuntu is both easy to start with and give you very convenient access to advanced tools. But you need to do some amount of configuration to get all the multimedia stuff working. In Mepis it all works right out of the box, but it uses KDE.
 
Fedora is pretty good for beginners, most settings can be done through gui. Ubuntu is great too, reason I am running it now over FC3 because it works 100% with my hardware - acpi for laptop (which is a b!tch) and wireless. Plus theres apt-get and the install is very small and fast, nothing you dont need.
 
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