Chris,
There's two things to think about:
1. How easy it is to install.
2. How well it will do what you want it to do.
I'm too much of a beginner myself to offer any useful advice on the second
point. However, here's my tuppence worth on the first.
Make sure you get as up-to-date a distro as possible: the more of your
hardware it will recognise automatically the easier installation will be.
Try a few download/cheap copies and see which install easily or run well
before shelling out on a commercial distro: good documentation will be
useful but is a waste of money if you can't get that distro up and running.
I recently installed Linux on my home PC for the first time. I tried SuSE
7.0 and Mandrake 8.0. My thought on them are:
1. SuSE didn't recognise my GeForce graphics card (though I believe SuSE
7.1 and later do). I therefore couldn't get the X-Server and the GUIs
going. Which version did you get with the book? If it's an old one it might
be a bit troublesome to install on a newish machine.
2. Neither recognised my Microsoft Intellimouse wheel mouse automatically.
With SuSE you seemed to have to go right on to the end of the installation
processs in text-only mode before you could configure the mouse manually;
with Mandrake you configured it manually more or less immediately after the
automatic recognition had failed.
3. On the other hand, I found the Mandrake installation process almost too
automatic: I thought the SuSE one gave you a bit more control as you went
along, without being much more complicated. The Mandrake installer rather
took over, and I've ended up with a dual boot Windows/Linux PC where Linux
is the default OS, whereas I'd ideally have liked to have Windows as the
default (yes, I know that's heresy).
Overall, I found Mandrake 8.0 very straightforward to install, so that's
the one I'd recommend if you want to get something up and running quickly.
But I'm a relative newbie myself so perhaps more experienced users can
suggest which version is most suited to what you want to do.
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