Advise on linux for a newbie 7248

On Thu, 22 Dec 2005 04:18:49 -0800, igor.espiau

Your RAM is fine but you need a bigger disk if you want to install a full blown distribution, I'd put at least a 60G drive in that machine, bigger if you can afford it.

If you just want to play with a minimal Linux distribution you could try Damn Small Linux. DSL is stripped to the bones, it only requires 50MB, so you could run it on your laptop with no upgrades. However DSL won't be a very satisfying Linux experience because it's missing most of the applications that you'll want to learn about, it's also missing the full featured Linux desktops (Gnome and KDE). For a complete Linux distro I'd suggest Fedora Core 4. FC4 comes with just about everything. FC4 is also the free sibling of Redhat Enterprise Linux. Most shops that run Oracle are likely to be using Redhat EL, the rest will be running on Novell SUSE. You could also try CentOS. CentOS is a free clone of Redhat EL. Most end users prefer to run Fedora Core instead of CentOS because it's more cutting edge, basically the current FC4 is what the next version of RHEL will be. However with either FC4 or CentOS you'll be using essentially the same system as most big corporate users.