Linux, anyone?

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

After the weekend's foray into dual-booting, I've decided to explore Linux.  A triple-booting machine. 

Anyone have any recommendations, for a dyed-in-the-wool Microsquish user?

Something that Just Works? 

If it works out, I may dedicate the Linux to web-surfing primarily, and perhaps E-mail.  I'm already on FireFox and Thunderbird, so porting those would be not-a-problem.

Thanks.

[ivor]

Are you looking for an OS recommendation?  I'd go with Ubuntu Desktop...

[beagle]

I'm a few years out of touch but SUSE used to be good.  Seemed to be heading rapidly downhill under Novell's ownership though. It was more MS-like than most in that the installs and updates were largely automatic, and instead of having a choice of twenty apps that sort of worked but with strange crashes it had two or three that really worked, for any given application area.

[ivor]

I had Ubuntu running for a long time. Never crashed once.  Ubuntu is the best as far as I know.  They do more through user interfaces than anybody else.  I think they've gotten over the fact that not everybody is gonna be a Linux expert one day.

You can make your own private elastic clouds with Ubuntu Server, utilize public clouds if you need to and it's free!

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

And Ubuntu can be configured to have far better graphic effects than any fruit themed toy, 90% of times it will work without issue on your HW (some printers and webcams may require fiddling) and the UI is pretty straight forward.

You can download and burn an image and it will allow you to run it from the CD without touching your partition.

The only recommendation is to be careful to leave enough space to install updates and SW as the automatic install may leave too little (unnecessarily).

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Thanks, all.  I plan on burning a CD to install it onto a bare drive.  It can have the whole drive, 120g-- it's a drive I replaced with a larger one a while back, and I'd forgot I even had it in my parts bin.

Anything special I'd need, to make a bootable install CD?  Or is that a newbie "duuuh" question?

The drive is SATA, not PATA, but the bios sees it fine.   For safety, I plan to de-connect all other drives until I'm done-- then I cannot make a mistake and accidentally install over something I want to keep.  (long story, but learned the hard way.....)

Once it's up and operational, I'll re-connect the remaining disks.  Would this cause issue with Linux?  I know that it (or so I recall) compiles itself during the install process-- would adding 4 NTFS drives after the install is complete confuse it?  I wouldn't think so, but....?

Ubuntu.... that seems to be the consensus here?  Or am I presuming?

Thanks, all, by the way.

[ivor]

If you get it up and running then I doubt you'll have any problems with it.  The only thing that's and issue is hardware which isn't as big a problem as it is for Microsloth.  After that you'll be impressed.  Then you'll be upset that there isn't as much software that runs on it like I was....

[beagle]

Ubuntu.... that seems to be the consensus here?  Or am I presuming?

I'd go with that. I'm 3 years out of date, and you can always buy one later if you don't like the free one.
I'd check whatever you go with understands your hardware though (does Ubuntu have a compatibility check program?) Support for new graphics cards used to be an issue once upon a time.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Hardware compatibility:  check.

So, I suppose the first order of business is to compile a list of my hardware, then check before starting?

I was not aware there were non-free versions.  Is there a major advantage to purchase vis a vis roll your own (free)?

[ivor]

I'd just wing-it and see what happens if you're not worried about another OS on the hard drive.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Other consideration re: install, is that ubuntu comes with a boot loader so if you remove the disks you may have a problem accessing either ubuntu or any of your windows systems. The bad side of ubuntu's boot loader is that it assumes by default that you want to run ubuntu, that is, if you turn on your PC and leave it alone you will find it on ubuntu unless you select other OS on boot.

Boot magic (used to come with partition magic) can do the trick but it isn't transparent sometimes.

[beagle]

I was not aware there were non-free versions.  Is there a major advantage to purchase vis a vis roll your own (free)?

At one time it was worth (at least for us as a business) paying SUSE £80 in order to get a version which came with CDs/DVDs, installed without hassle, and just worked.
That was more than 5 years ago though, so maybe the free ones are just as good now. Also since Novell took over the SUSE support pages plummeted in quality (IMHO). To give you some idea by how much, we used to use the German SUSE support site rather than Novell's English one (despite us all being appalling German speakers), because it seemed to be the last to get converted to the new corporate standard of nastiness.
Having stuff on DVDs  and a good automatic update  system avoided endless round trips downloading packages (which was once a Linux feature, but again is probably better now).

[ivor]

I haven't played much with the boot loader...  I always had a dedicated machine...

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Ubuntu practically updates itself for free. IIRC Red Hat has a pay version but it is used for servers so it wouldn't apply.

[ivor]

Yup, Ubuntu has auto update just like Microsoft.  It works great!  There's even a free virus scanner called ClamAV.