hi, im a novice linux user
just looking for a good new distro
im particular to redhat, but open to anything, except mandrake that is (no offense)
but I am more in particular looking for something 2.6 out of the box
im using xandros right now, and although its nice and all for such a newb like me, i find it almost too windows like

I am also looking for some links to some linux enthusiast sites

I think it's to early. 2.6 is very recent.

or maybe perhaps who might get there first?

The next Fedora core (due out in February or March, I believe) will use 2.6

Mandrake 10 beta 1 has kernel 2.6.1 and KDE 3.2. I just installed it and it looks pretty good.

See the story in the news archives;

http://www.linuxcompatible.org/story25854.html

Koppnix 3.3 11/19/03 release
Linux 2.6.1
KDE 3.1.3

http://www.distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=knoppix

Makes an eyepopping Debian HD install. Better than anything else I've tried, and with more potential for whatever you want to do.

The list of mirrors is on the Koppnix site.

Gentoo's been able to support the 2.6 kernel for a while, you can even compile everything against the 2.6 kernel headers (which enables such niceties as NPTL support) if you want. Slackware also claims to be "2.6 ready" but misses an important detail: The script to start the ALSA sound drivers (which are now in the kernel) is in the alsa-driver package (which are compiled for the stock 2.4.22 kernel) and not the alsa-utils (or one of the other core ALSA packages) meaning you can't just drop a 2.6 kernel in right away. It's a simple matter to extract the init script but it's annoying nonetheless.

Gotta echo the Gentoo sentiment. You can simply select the kernel you want from Gentoo's portage system, emerge it with one statement, put it in the oven and bake it.

It doesn't get much simpler than that.

I'll never go back to RH, Mandrake, Fedora, or anything. Gentoo's code and people absolutely destroy the other distros.

Can Gentoo be installed directly from another distro, or do you have to wipe the old and start over?

Yep, provided said distro has the tools to create/format disk partitions in your choices of filesystems, the tar command to extract the stage tarball and the chroot command to "switch" into your Gentoo environment and complete the install. You don't even need a seperate partition for Gentoo, you can extract the stage tarball into a directory on an existing Linux parition and chroot into that to install Gentoo.

I have enough hd space to run my present distro and Gentoo. How would I go about setting up so I could run both?

The same way you'd go about installing Linux alongside Windows though with Linux you can set multiple distros up to share the same swap partition. You'll also want to make sure you're using GRUB as your bootloader as it makes it a lot easier to multi boot several Linux distros. At one point I had something like 4 Linux distro's installed on my computer and all I had to do to add another one to grub was copy my entry for Gentoo and change the partition. No need to mount the boot partition of each new distro, no need to recommit GRUB to the MBR, nothing. As soon as I saved the grub.conf and rebooted it was on the menu.

Actually, recently I installed a Gentoo server while a Mandrake server was running. I ssh'd into the Mandrake server and loaded Gentoo onto a separate hard drive while the Mandrake server was running. After I finished the Gentoo compile/install, I rebooted into Gentoo and bang, it was done.

Gotta love it!

What is the MDK10 repository cd?