LINUX distribution question
 

I rebuilt an old laptop today for a family member that wants a computer to play some online game. I used an old copy of XP pro that i had laying around and the key was rejected.

I want to try to load LINUX on it as the primary OS since its free. Machine has a P3 and 320MB of real memory so it should be fine. Whats the best/most stable/easiest to install LINUX distribution to work with? I dont need anything that is dual bootable. Ive dabbled with bootable LINUX CDs before, but this will be my first install so Im really looking for an easy to install distribution.

I also want to wipe windows completely off of the machine. Whenever I install LINUX, will it give the option of completely deleting the existing partition or do I need to run fdisk or something before I try to install it?

Any advice is appreciated

I believe you will have the option to repartion the disk.

I think Red Hat has a pretty mature distribution. The killer with Linux is drivers. I would be worried about it having proper video drivers and such....

yeah, im pretty sure I'll have issues. Oh well, its time for me to learn all of this stuff anyway.

Is there anything I can get from the windows machine before I blow it away that will help with the driver info. Ive got my network adapter disk here, but I have no idea if I still have any of the disks for the video/audio stuff that came on the machine.

the game my nephew wants to use this thing for is called Runescape. Anybody know anything about it?

just remembered that I have a recent knoppix and a mepis distribution on disk already. any thoughts on either of those?

The newest Knoppix should be enough to get started... You'll want to update & install a lot of stuff, though. It might be easier if you don't have a lot of Linux experience to just download Fedora4 and trim off the packages you don't need.

When you install, it will let you partition the drive to remove all remnants of Windows.

well I just loaded the mepis disk. Im not ignoring you guys, I had already started before I saw a response :) Im posting from the laptop now so it seems okay so far.

thanks for the help

Redhat. Easy to install. Slackware if you want to have fun - like working on a p-car. :-)

One thing you could do, just to see how Linux will work, is to burn an ISO image of Knoppix or Mandrake Move and boot off of it. These are fully bootable, working distros, so you will know if there are device/driver issues. Then, if all looks well, I'd go for RadHat Fedora or Enterprise Linux 4.x with the 2.6 kernel.

I have used fedora core 1-4 They are bad, but stability isn't its strong point. A friend at work has started using SUSE on our work machines, and it is really nice. I am going to move my machines to SUSE too. It has a stable desktop, good driver support and all of the apps that folks like.

The Knopix live CD option mentioned earlier is something to consider. I haven't done this, but you have the option of actually installing it too. If you have enough disk space, it isn't too hard to get a bunch of distributions installed and decide which you like best.

Redhat was the first place I looked. Nothing free jumped off the website at me. Im sure there is a free distribution there, but I remembered that I had the MEPIS disk after Id been there for a few minutes so I went ahead and loaded it.

The bootable CDs Ive used were really slow. This machine doest have to do much. Internet and sound work on it. As long as the game works for my 10 yr old cousin, this is going to work fine. Just didnt want to spend anymore money on it.

you can download a lot of different linux distro's from here:

http://www.linuxiso.org/index.php

just in case you weren't sure where to look. My 2 cents would be for debian. stable as can be, but doesn't support a lot of newer hardware. I think their stable release is still running of the 2.4 kernal, not sure though.

Had an easy time with Knoppix here.. if mepis doesn't work for you...

cool. thanks. Ive got a Knoppix CD as well. I'll try that one next.

Redhat doesn't have a home consumer edition any more. Fedore Core is the replacement for that...sorta. I'd setup a liveCD Ubutnu (similar to knoppix, based on debian) and have some settings and data storage on the harddrive, as well as the CD image (so it is a little faster and she doesn't need the CD to run her comptuer), then just give her a new CD every so often.

I've got my home machine running Ubuntu (dual boot). The only hard parts were:

- dual boot(!) using two drives - one with Linux, one with Windows
- getting a second soundcard (not the onboard one) to work
- getting a friggin USB wireless card to work (with WPA encryption).

There was plenty of information on the internet to help me figure those three things out. The wireless card was particularly difficult because doing virtually any sort of upgrade or installation is 1000% easier over the internet (for downloading the files and for tech support). Linux seems to be about Google skills.

Ubuntu has great forums which are really useful for noobs (like me). There is also Kubuntu, which uses KDE instead of Gnome (different graphic environments).

However, apparently both KDE and Gnome are a bit resource-hungry... but I've got a 2800+ and 1gb of ram so no worries.

I prefer Fedora Core myself. Lots of good packages, and a tweakable graphical install. Lots of support for newer hardware and such.