[HawkBoy]

I want to learn about linux, and how to run it without destroying my pc. Know any good sites?

Keep in mind that I'm pretty good with computers, not affraid to get technical, and despite the name, I'm 18 years old =)

[ewaite]

Mandrake has the friendliest user community in my experience. The best place to start is http://mandrakeuser.org and http://mandrakeforum.com. As for a recommended distro, I would recommend Mandrake 8.2, Suse 8.0 or RedHat 7.3 for the new Linux user. Mandrake and RedHat have CD-Images freely available to download (Suse does not! ). Mandrake has the best installer (in my opinion) and auto-detects more hardware than most other distos.

[sapiens74]

Try www.apple.com, www.amd.com, www.netscape.com, www.holyjihad.com,

NOt much Linux there, but similar rhetoric :P


Seriously, Mandrake is the best community out there. Find answers to a lot of questions. Tho unfortunately the Linux community has a bit of an arrogance problem, so don't be suprised when your talked down too.

[Admiral LSD]

Most distro installers (at least, every one I've used) allow you to set up a dual boot without messing up any other OS's you happen to have installed provided you have the space available to create the Linux partitions in beforehand. Mandrake is the only distro I know of that has partition resizing built into the installer. Just make sure that, when it asks, you install the boot loader (either LILO or Grub) into the MBR (if you don't already use a commercial bootloader. NTs bootloader doesn't count).

[bobbinbrisco]

http://linuxquestions.org

[HawkBoy]

Admiral LSD: I installed linux once: I gave it an empty hard drive. I turned off the other one from the CMOS. After the installation, I could not use the other hard drive if I turned it on. In fact I could not use ANY other hard drive configuration without my startup beeing interupted by and infinite stream of 1s and 0s (I never thought I'd actually see 1s and 0s anywhere other than in assembly)