If your a Microsoft Windows user wanting to broaden your horizon (good move btw) but have no experience with Linux, then I suggest you download or get a hold of the "Live CD" for Fedora and Ubuntu, these two are the best in my opinion, for not only new users, but seasoned users as well, they both have excellent hardware support for new and ancient hardware.
http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://fedoraproject.org/
The "Live CD's" wont have all of the software included or support for everything, as CD's are just that, CD's, and are space limited, they are sort of a "try before you buy" kinda thing, but of course you don't buy, because Linux is free, free to download, burn copies, and redistribute, in person, FTP or even torrents, all perfectly legal... So play around with both, for a couple of days each to see which one you might like.
Ok, so if you have decided on which distro you'd rather use, you can install it from your "Live CD", and, you can also keep your existing installed copy of XP, the installers of Ubuntu and Fedora will see XP and will allow you to repartition/resize your HDD so it can install (BACKUP your existing Windows/existing data FIRST).
Linux's boot loader will also take control of things, GRUB will upon bootup offer you to boot normally into Linux, boot into a repair mode, maybe even offer memory testing option, and lastly any non Linux OS's, such as XP, if you do nothing, normally in about 10 seconds it will auto boot into your first kernel, being Linux.
The install method for both are perfectly painless in either dual boot or Linux only installs to a brand new drive. I caution you though, if you are using a brand new clean HDD and will want Windows on it as well, please, install Windows first, this way Linux's boot loader can take control, installing Linux first and then Windows, may give unsuspecting results, like unable to access Linux, always, repeat always, let Linux's boot loader control the system, it is far more intelligent than Windows.
My choices differ depending on operations, personally, for laptop, notebook and desktops, I opt for Ubuntu, but ONLY their LTS version, the LTS versions have a support life of 3 years, where are normal non LTS versions are replaced every 6 months and supported for only 12 months. Fedora operates on much the same time frame but have no LTS version, this is the ONLY reason I choose Ubuntu over Fedora on desktops and laptops/notebooks etc.
However, for servers, you simply can not go past Slackware, it is the oldest Linux distribution, and remains true to Unix type.
In fact Redhat and debian both came about being forked from Slackware, something very few but the oldest die hards of them actually know.
http://www.slackware.com
Slackware does come with a graphical user interface as well, but it only comes with KDE, which I detest, its slow, troublesome, crappier than Gnome, so for that reason I don't use Slackware as my regular OS on my desktops etc, but you can't beat it for simplicity and reliability for servers, it's installation is really for those who understand Linux, but even a novice could grasp it easy enough. Updates are for greater than 5 years by default.
Slackware has the advantage of its not butchered, hacked or "flavourised" liked various others, such as Ubuntu (which is really Debian), Fedora (which is RedHat) or SuSE etc, where they apply their own little distro patches, and most often this can be a problem, one also only has to look at the recent SSL debacle where Debian thought they knew better than openssl folk, they patched it, and the consequences were severe, severe for not only those running Debian/Ubuntu, but severe for anyone running a Secure Certificate that was signed on a Debian/Ubuntu system, even if they were not running that OS.
It's one of the many things I and many others love about Slackware, remaining true to form, or true to source/upstream, meaning, it stays the way the program writers actually wrote it and meant it to be used, hence there is very few patches required since its always stable and rock solid reliable, nor is there any breaking up of packages into 5 or more subsets, which might now or in the future present problems to that software, the likes of Debian are good for doing things like that, seriously if a program was meant to be broken up into 5 to 10 smaller packages I'm sure upstream would have done that and released it as such
This is how the likes of Debian/Ubuntu can lay claim they have thousands more packages than other distros, it is NOT that they support any or many other programs than others, it is simply because of how they package plain single packages, just look at easy things like bind or mysql etc, yes, it's really just deceitful marketing. It stands to reason if you break a single package up into 2 or more bits then you are going to have thousands more packages than another distro, but only to get the same end result.Think carefully, every action has a reaction, and not every reaction is positive, I know a lot of die hard (blinded debian/RedHat) folk will disagree, that's their right I guess) but the facts tend to speak for themselves. I do also use CentOS, which is really RedHat Enterpise Linux, it's also suitable for commercial installations as well as Slackware, RedHat do contribute the most towards development of Linux kernel and promotion of Linux in general.
Taking nothing away from Debian/Ubuntu, RedHat and Fedora, they are for the most part reliable OS's, after all I did above say I'm using Ubuntu LTS on my desktop and (dual boot) laptop and although Ubuntu has its quirks, its works for the most part. I have been happy enough, and for any new users (who wont be running servers) you simply wont be disappointed in either of them. I have been using Slackware on servers for many years and would never change that so if you are installing Linux for a server, then please take the time to install and learn Slackware, it will pay off big time for you down the track, you'll be surprised that you have total control over your system, no apt-get/synaptic/yum/yast package manager telling you you dont need 75 installed packages and insisting it removes them because they are too dumb to figure out that a source package you installed needs them.
For support, both Ubuntu and Fedora have very active user mailing lists where people are willing to help new users, so long as, you are prepared to help yourself, in other words, it's like anything in life, don't go asking for help if you're not prepared to help yourself, often googling what your after can give you a viable answer in seconds, where as mailing list might take hours to days depending on how rare your request is.
Because many product makers are narrow visioned and only support Windows (and sometimes Macs) some exotic addon hardware may have problems in some rare cases, I tend to buy HP printers, HP are like Dell, a supporter of Linux,
I use a HP 6310 MF networked (but also has USB port) fax/printer/scanner under Linux and its detected and works perfectly, I have a Quickcam web camera, a TV tuner card and in my file server an internal hardware modem, all detected and working, no need to go searching for drivers... The laptops soft-modem works great with hsfmodem, (IMPORTANT if you use ubuntu do not use the ubuntu supplied version go to the the website and get the real source package and install it else you will have problems) The Linux firewall, using iptables is also very powerful and functional, far more than Windows's.
The printer was a funny one, as mentioned my laptop is dual boot, so XP couldn't find drivers and wanted the driver CD, no problems, installed, it took close to 45 bloody minutes to do everything before I could print a test page, booted into Ubuntu, found, up came cups, confirmed the IP of the the device, I was printing my test page 2 and a half minutes later, awesome!
I will always support and buy from hardware vendors that support Linux.
If you are a new user (most likely since you've got this far) I do recommend that you grab OpenOffice from (http://www.openoffice.org ) when you're comfortable with using the systems RPM or APT package manager, since both of these do in fact reduce the full capabilities of OpenOffice, so you'll need to use your package manager and remove the installed versions, then install your downloaded full copy using RPM or DPKG.
If you are still not sure you want to try Linux, well here's a copy from my website (some of you may have entered here from it) ...
MS Office 2007 PRO oem (system only, no cd) $449
OpenOffice $0.00
Win XP PRO oem (system only, no cd) $279
Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit oem (system only) $249, Windows 7 CD (non -oem) $468
Windows Small Business Server 2008 (Std w/ 5 clients OEM) $1149
Windows Server Enterprise 2003 $4599
Linux - Laptop, Notebook, Desktop, Server $0.00
Microsoft MSSQL Server Ent Edition 2008, 25 client lic $20,690
MySQL or PostGreSQL both $0.00
*** Microsoft Windows, MS Office and MS SQL prices are based on current WIWO counter prices in Brisbane Australia as of October 2009
So people ... how much money are you really wasting eh?
Ok, thats enough for now I think, so off you go, download one of the CD's or DVD's from a mirror near you, or maybe you have a CD courtesy of a PC magazine, or a friends got one (yes I understand some countries still charge a premium for data) likely is a friend will have or can get you copy even if you don't have internet access yourself.
I once read something on the net I found so true, it said "what does Windows have plenty of that Linux doesn't", the answer was "bugs and exploits"
Cheers,
Noel
