Anyone got any recommendations? I've had little experience with red hat and thats about it, wanna get into it more and learn.

Ubuntu (and derivatives), fedora core, and SUSE are all good starter distros. I personally love ubuntu

Ubuntu is very easy to use (from OS install to apt-get), and it's become a big time favorite amongst new Linux users, so it's easy to find advice and guides and troubleshooting help, etc.

Fedora Core is reasonably easy to use, and a perennial academic favorite (no clue why). If you're going to college soon, it's a reasonably good choice (seriously, of the 6 campuses that I've seen, 5 of them support Fedora Core as their Linux distro).

Mandrake is similar to Red Hat, and very flexible. It's a reasonable choice as well, though honestly, I think most of the advantages offered by Red Hat or Mandrake are now also offered by Ubuntu. However, Mandrake transitions better into a powerful distro for experienced users, so that may be good if you plan to get that far into it.

SuSE is supposedly a good choice, but I know jackshit about it.

Debian is neat/awesome, primarily because of its wonderful package management and stability. A bit more of a learning curve than the earlier ones, but I didn't find it so bad. However, I was fairly comfortable with Linux (from a user-on-server-no-root kind of way) already. That said, these days, newbies keep going to Ubuntu instead of Debian because of the former's ease of use (and since it uses the APT for packages too). My warning would be that on Ubuntu, packages have a tendency to conflict and hate each other, which happens much less on Debian (Ubuntu packages are drawn from the unstable branch).

Or be really l33t (read: stupid) and listen to your "I hack the kernel for fun" friend when he suggests you play with Slackware because "it's not that much harder to use". A really great way to buildup suicidal urges. Though, actually, Slackware is pretty awesome once you get over the incredibly huge initial learning curve.

You could also use something like Lindows. I think the free version has some stupid name like Freespirit or something now. If you did, we'd laugh. A lot.

This is all assuming you want to install a full OS, though. You might want to go with a mini-distribution and just play around for a while, i.e. Puppy Linux. Puppy is fucking awesome on a laptop, saves battery power like nobody's business.

Aye, fedora is a wonderful choice if you wanna move into linux administration as most of the linux servers around run red hat which is basically fedora plus a few packages and with some support lines.

I walked in to A Lowes (read: like home-depot, but not as manly) one day to see that every register, computer, etc was running redhat with a very old version of X. I'm guessing it was probably Fedora version 7 or 8.

Were talking comparable to OS 9 here.

Oh, and I recommend Ubuntu.

I started my linux adventures on a Knoppix live CD, moved to a Slax live CD, then to installing suse 10.1, then moved on to putting ubuntu on a bunch of boxes, then using Fedora at school, installing suse 10.2, then some more ubuntu.

So far I enjoyed Ubuntu the most. Firstly for being on one CD, secondly for actually working out of the box, and thirdly... beryl!... wait, I mean apt.

At this point I am pretty damn comfortable with installing it, but I still haven't got a clue what im doing for the most part

I also cant do much without a guide and a rather large chunk of time.

If those are your only criteria, then you're better off with Debian? The packages don't kill each other.

Ubuntu is simply crazy easy to use (and install), which is its main virtue and why I'm dualbooting it on my desktop. But, if you do choose Ubuntu, though, make sure to dig deeper (past the GUI) and start getting at the lovely innards. Otherwise you'll be forever confused about how things work. Once you start to understand a little more about the command line world and what not, things make more sense.

Well i downloaded it last night and burned it, verified the cd and such. Goto install it, goes past the ubuntu load screen then comes to a tanish screen and a little window all corrupted appears and then it stops doing anything. Almost looks like a graphics issue but i dont know. I took out the "silent quiet" or whatever in the other options on the menu to see what its doing, but everything was fine it just did the same thing past that.

So its not so easy so far, i might just end up trying something else i dunno we will see when i get home from work.

knopix? We used to use it to circumvent internet blocking when I went to high school, for some reason it wouldn't filter when knopix was used... To bad the coders were nice and disallowed write capability for the HDD, that way people can't h4x comps with it...

Then again we did manage to get the pw for the bess server and we could add / remove websites from the allow / block list at will...

Fedora version 7 comes on the 24th of this month. Perhaps you mean red hat linux version 7 or 8? Fedora is red hat's community (started in 2001-ish)

Knopix is meant as a forensic tool, which is why it doesn't allow writing to the hard-drive.

derrr, redhat

Odd, I still have my older version of Knoppix, and it does write to the HD. I tend to use it on winderz machines that refuse to boot, and are too corrupted to use recovery console on.

I think, even in the current Knoppix, however, you just have to drop to the prompt and open write permissions. Tis just they are disabled by default.

...and who puts a word processor and games in their forensic tool?

Mayhaps you're thinking of knoppix std? Knoppix is designed more as a system testing distro / quick working desktop.

Maybe you're stupid

Yes, it could be that was what I was thinking about. It's been a while since I've used it.