Linux?

[directhex]

and i just wish they would stop naming everything after toy story characters....

not happenin'

[peterb]

well debian, as standard, doesn't actually give you a gui...

...so its not a problem not to get one!

I must confess I hadn't realised that! I've just been looking (briefly) at the Debian website - looks as if there is a bt of history with Gnome!

[JIM_BOB7813]

You can get 'Live CD's for most distros which load into the OS into your RAM meaning you can play with them without installig anything permanently onto your hard drive.
There's also VMware which allows you to boot up other operating systems while you are in windows (like emulation).
I personally use Mandriva but Ubuntu would be a good choice because of the massive amount of support available for it.

[gm1164]

I would look at ubuntu 7.10 there are script installers such as automatix 2 and also envy better support for nvidia but still bugs with ati what worked this week may break next week the more special effects that are enabled opensuse 10 .3 works well also as does fedora 7 but all in all its easier to use ubuntu as there appears to be more people community wise working on it also some of it just applies to all as they are based off the same kernals all in all they are fun to play with but there are bugs have been able to resolve all issues by research of the net on there repective sites

[kopite]

I got ubuntu running fine on my dell inspiron 6400 laptop. Has an ATI graphics card and worked fine. the only problem is that the hibernation didnt work properly but this was a few months ago.

Ubuntu is so easy to install though and really intuitive to use.

[ikonia]

Yes, i would also recommend ubuntu... I run unbuntu on my vm at work, its lovely.

ubuntu = winxp
debian = win2003

Lol

Please don't misslead people with utter nonsense statments like this.

Ubuntu is nothing like Windows, or the versioning status, neither is debian or any linux distribution.

[ikonia]

I would look at ubuntu 7.10 there are script installers such as automatix 2 and also envy better support for nvidia but still bugs with ati what worked this week may break next week the more special effects that are enabled opensuse 10 .3 works well also as does fedora 7 but all in all its easier to use ubuntu as there appears to be more people community wise working on it also some of it just applies to all as they are based off the same kernals all in all they are fun to play with but there are bugs have been able to resolve all issues by research of the net on there repective sites

I hope the origional poster ignores this very unwise advice.

The tools mentioned hear will lose you the large community support that this poster is talking about. The tools this user talking about are nothing to do with the official ubuntu community and actually the developers of the said tools are at logger heads with ubuntus development community in terms of methodoligy.

more special effects that are enabled opensuse 10 .3

nope, Suse was the leaders in the "effects" you mention. Ubuntu is based on stability versioning rather than more and better.

also some of it just applies to all as they are based off the same kernals all in all they are fun to play with

All linux distributions are based of the same kernel source tree with verying degree's of patches down to the desires of the packager. So what you are saying makes no sense, however the 3 distros you mention opensuse, Fedora and Ubuntu all use different kernel release versions anyway, so that makes even less sense.

I'm getting a little tired of you spouting nonsense to people asking for help on a topic you clearly understand nothing about.

Please stop.

[gm1164]

sorry to offend this was not my intent