"Distro" suggestion for new Linux user

[crashnburn]

VirtualBox is my preferred piece of software for VMs. It's free and runs pretty fast. There are 2 versions of VirtualBox - an open-source version and binary version. The biggest difference is that the open-source version does not have usb support, the binary version does. You can either google it or Ubuntu probably has it in Synaptic.

A warning about games: In general, VMs won't be able to run games that us OpenGL/3D acceleration. I say in general because there are some projects out there working on it but I don't know the status of them. The VM sees a virtual graphics card and not the actual hardware, and so it only provides VESA/VGA support.

Sounds interesting.

[TheRedFox]

I would like to recommend ArchLinux as a good linux for learning linux, because it starts with barebones command-line utilities, but it still has a package manager, so you don't have to constantly go through the process of compiling which seems to fail like 10 or 15% of the time. you still do for some things, but that helps you learn. Also it's really fast and configurable.
note that it also helps to have a friend who knows what he's doing with linux to point out the fact that startx won't work unless you actually have xorg installed. lol

[mgw]

I think it's worthwhile to share some experience...

This is was about my 4th attempt to get a TP up and running on Linux. I've experimented with Fedora, Mint and some others before... this time I got serious. It took me about 2 hours to have my Windos environment largely replicated with Ubuntu on a TP 60 from scratch.

• download the ISO image and burn to CD
• start the TP with the burned CD and follow the installation dialog (I did not intend to use a dual boot setup. I felt it's not necessary since I don't play games on my TP)
• adjust the language settings to fit your needs
• 8.10 comes with OpenOffice 2.4 - use Synaptic to upgrade in any case:
• make yourself familiar with the package support using Synaptic (do not get hooked up on fancy Linux code lines to install software!)
• make sure you scan the forums and ask questions before you start installing anything - I got first class support for any of my questions (watch out for language support like in http://www.ubuntu-forum.de/ otherwise http://ubuntuforums.org/ works best)
• "manual" intervention (i.e. open a terminal and put some lines of code in a "configuration file" using an editor is necessary only if WiFi doesn't reconnect after suspend and to enable correct trackpoint support (still haven't figured out how to adjust it's sensitivity)

There are several guides on the forum called "how to" which I found very helpful i.e. for setting up FTP. Also make sure you download the pocket guide from http://www.ubuntupocketguide.com/index2.html and get yourself a user on launchpad https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu.

Please keep in mind: you don't need to become a Linux nerd - in fact I don't have a clue how this really works... anyhow I have EAC up and running in WINE and my Squezebox works just fine.

Hope this helps.

-Michael