A Couple Of Questions

[jimras]

I have a couple of questions for you experts.

I have heard a lot of good things about Linux and I would love to try it out.

My system should handle it just fine...Athalon 2500+ 1.87 Gig -- 512 MG RAM -- 2 80GB HD's.

What I am wondering is this -- I have read that you should install Linux on it's own partition of the HD. Since I have TWO HD's and I use very little of the 2nd one, I could easily clean this drive off and have it totally clean. Can I install Linux onto the 2nd HD instead of trying to partition the first one? Also--the HD is formatted NTFS. Will this make any difference??

I could set up a dual boot or I could just go into the BIOS and choose which HD to boot from.

What would be a good version of Linux to start with?

Any thoughts or suggestions for me??

[iccaros]

you should install on the second harddrive..just to be safe and so windows can not mess up your linux partitions.. (as they used to do with OS/2)

as for dual boot. at the end of most linux installs they ask where you want to install the boot loader (for you it would be hda as that is your first drive) and it will set up dual boot for you or ask if you want dual boot. so you don't have to worry about that..

last as for the best..

any answer you get on this is based on personal openion.. and well is worth that much..

for most new users, distrobutions like Mandrake, SUSE, fedora have great installers and in such make it easy to start.

if you really want to learn

I would suggest

gentoo

slackware

(bsd is not linux but great unix and can compile most of the same software or has its own to do the same thing)

if you really would like to play try VMware

[hitest]

I agree with iccaros. All of the rpm distros will work fine on your unit. I'm currently using Slackware and like it a lot. BSD was fun as well. I would download some distros and give them a test drive.