ok... i have a AMD-64 3200+ (sk 939), MSI K8T Neo2 Motherboard, a 256mb Radeon 9800XT, Creative 7.1 sound card, 80 GB HD (30 GB to XP, 50 left alone [un-partitioned]) What flavour of Linux do i want??? All i know is i want a 64-bit version!!! and easy to install would be nice (CD .iso image?). I googled it and i got sum results, i was going to go with SUSE... but it said the download could not be turned into a cd installer! and then i got REALLY confused when it was saying to download and burn a image file... WT :swear: ???
An ISO image is an exact copy of a CD or DVD which is compressed into one large file for portability. You will need some good CD burning software, such as Nero Burning ROM, in order to burn your ISO to a CD. Simply copying the ISO to a data CD will not do; you must open the ISO as you would a txt file in notepad, for example. Nero will recreate the CD structure from the ISO file and make you a bootable Linux install disc. I recommend Mandriva Linux, since it's like better Red Hat in that it's well supported and has a huge package base, yet is faster and more streamlined. Mandriva is arguably the most desktop-ready Linux distro, although SuSE is also very good. I'm not blowing smoke here, since I'm a Windows-free zone. As for your hardware, Linux has very good hardware support and runs on a vast array of platforms. However, ATI has a bad reputation for its Linux driver support. In other words, you may have some problems getting 3D accelleration working with your video card. It's also possible that you will have no problems at all, since ATI's Linux support is getting better with every driver release, but I never had much luck. ATI's Linux support made an NVidia fan out of me, since NVidia's Linux support is second to none. All the best, -AT
Thankeee's!!!! [tho i do know howto use a .iso file ] its halfway thru the download... what are the text files in the directory along with the download??? (on the webpage, http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/sunsite.uio.no/ftp/linux/mdl/official/iso/10.2/x86_64/) And do i need them? (if so, what do i do with them)
Those text files are the CRC hash of the ISO image. You use that to compare the MD5 fingerprint of the ISO to the MD5 hash to verify its integrity. -AT
