installing linux

I'm pretty new to the whole linux thing. I just finished building a new computer with that has an old and empty 10 gig hard drive, and instead of inputting the ussual windows xp, I would like to install linux. The problem arises when, I dont know where to get linux, or even how to begin the installation of it. The closes to linux I've managed to use are cd bootups like knoppix. I know you need alot of knowledge to use linux, but in order to attain that knowledge it be nice to have a helping hand, once its installing i can lookup the information on my own.

Fedora and Ubuntu both have ridiculously easy installers that you really won't need any help with. As long as you're not running particularly obscure hardware, you should be up and running with no problems or extraneous configuration to do.

I'd suggest Ubuntu as well. It's what I put on my wife's laptop yesterday to celebrate the arrival of my new router.

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ and follow the links. Feel free to order some free CDs, but don't wait around; they'll take a few months to arrive if at all. In the meantime you'll be wanting to hit that "download" link :)

thank you very much.

I have a mini itx mobo, with an amd sempron processor.
weird thing was, when I would run knoppix of gnome live cd it would recognize the processor as an amd athlon. anyways thanks for the help. ill download now and try to install later tonight.

Yeah the Sempron is basically a cheapo Athlon. I was considering getting one, but Athlon64s aren't that much more expensive.

By the way: good luck!
When you're done installing (assuming you went for Ubuntu), this site is a good starting point for help:
http://ubuntuguide.org/

just finished installing ubuntu a minute ago, everything went great without any problems. (other than a partiion mistake where i partioned the main drive to 500megs and couldnt install anything, but it was fixed with a reinstall.) Hopefully during the weekend I can hook it up to the network and post on here with it.

Ubuntu,so far, is great. I installed it on my laptop this evening, been using it for a couple hours now with no problems whatsoever. The laptop crashed like crazy under XP, we were sure it was a hardware issue, after several reinstalls and formats, with no progress. But here I am, using Linux, and it's been totally stable since the install. It's shocking to me how easy the install and operation was, after all the horror stories I'd heard.

I really, honestly, don't miss Windows one bit, so far. I'm keeping XP on my desktop rig, for now, as a stable install would require a reformat, and I don't really feel like backing up 30 gigs of media with only a 8x CD burner, plus I'd like to keep my gaming capabilities, but on the laptop, which will only serve browsing, office, and basic multimedia capabilities, it's awesome!

I'm also very impressed with the software suite that came standard with Ubuntu. OpenOffice, Firefox, GIMP, Gaim, and so on, all stuf I expected to have to download, are all already here.

Only regret is that I didn't do this sooner! Only problem I've had, so far, is that this laptop lacks USB 2.0 and Wi-Fi (It's about 2.5 years old, Athlon 1900+ and so on), making transferring all my MP3s over take forever. (I've got ~7GB on my iRiver)

I think this calls for a w00t.

w00t!

w00t

ok interenet is setup on the linux box, finally managed to sit down and hook it up online. Also put it next to my windows box and am using syergy to manage both systems.