Welcome to our community

I want to start to learn Linux. There seems to be a huge number of distro's around. Can anyone suggest the best one to get started.

Hello Rob
I am sure that anyone who has used Linux will give you a different answer. In my opinion I would go with a distribution which is very popular. You will find more HOWTO's and discussion groups on Fedora, Ubuntu, and SuSe than most others.

In addition to getting help with the popular distro's you will find more binary packages for applications.

The other choice you need to make, is Gnome or KDE. Gnome has become more popular.

I would download Fedora Core 9 and use it foe a few weeks, and then try Ubuntu.

Hope this help

Ubuntu is all the rave and its very user friendly, too much so if you ask me.

If your looking to gain knowledge of something thats used in industry such as red hat or SUSE then you can install Fedora or Centos, whilst SUSE do a free download of their version.
There are numerous live CD/DVD versions of Linux which work off the disk, but they are slow as a result, if your serious you need to install a version you can modify etc.

In which case you could install something like SUN Virtual Box
http://www.virtualbox.org/
Where you can install virtual machine and try various versions for yourself. This works well and Virtual Box is free for private use (unlike VMWare). The downside is that you will need a fairly meaty system to make it work. ie 1GB Mem 2Ghz is minimum.

Yet another alternative is Cygwin, which actually runs a Linux shell (based on redhat) within Windows, even X windows etc. Its not pretty but it works and has some of the major applications. Very useful for working with Unix files and you don't have a Unix/Linux system to work with.
http://www.cygwin.com/
Finally, once you have installed a Linux version you can make use of that vendors documentation or for more generic Linux info visit
http://linux.tnc.edu.tw/techdoc/linux-books/rute/

Good luck

Thanks for the replies. I will be using an old PC which is pretty low spec, so I don't think I will be using any virtualisation.

I will give Ubuntu a try for a few weeks and then try both Fedora and SUSE. I will also give Cygwin a go on my MS system.

I think the main thing is to just get started with something and then be more selective as I get more skilled.

Again - many thanks
Rob

I am starting to understand a little about Linux after a few weeks of reading Howtos and trying out a few things. It's a lot more rewarding than pointing and clicking around Windows.

I would like to start documenting information abount configuration and so on. Has anyone had any involvement with the LDP, it would be nice to format the information in the same way.
Cheers
Rob

Hello Rob
To get started you need to do 3 things:

First you can buy or download free of charge the O'Reilly book "DocBook: The Definitive Guide" you can find a link to the download:

HERE

Next you need to install the various packages needed to start publishing. I cannot remember each by its name but look for:

docbook, sgml, xml, openjade, Norman Walsh's DSSSL and so on. You should find plenty of howto's on this.

The final thing you need is an editor. I have customised gvim so that I can quickly enter the most common tags into the document. If you need some help with this let me know.

Getting started with Docbook takes some time and practice, but is not too difficult if you are already familiar with HTML. If have been using a WYSIWYG editor you spend a great deal of time with the layout and look and feel of the document. Using Docbook you focus on technical content and structure, and not how pretty it looks.

Good Luck
Dogbert