First, I must make it clear that I likely have a bias here, since I work for Red Hat.
Second, I wish to note that pre-RH, I used Debian.
So:
I would suggest Fedora (Red Hat's free, community distro) or Ubuntu for ease of use. Unfortunately, much as I love Debian and its goals, it's not easy to use. Or wasn't. (might be better now)
I'd be slightly wary of Ubuntu only because it's being kept afloat because the guy in charge is very well off; so it could go away randomly.
I'd be actively avoidant of SuSe, because of who currently owns them.
It should just be as simple as putting a CD (which you will likely have to burn) into a CD-bootable drive on a system with a hard drive, running the install, and answering a few questions.
(so, yes, you should be able to just put it in. Depending on whether or not you are using IDE, and what number of cables you have, there may be issues relating to the jumper settings and locations on the cable for the hard & CD drives; theoretically, though, you should be fine)
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Date: 2008-01-11 07:29 pm (UTC)First, I must make it clear that I likely have a bias here, since I work for Red Hat.
Second, I wish to note that pre-RH, I used Debian.
So:
I would suggest Fedora (Red Hat's free, community distro) or Ubuntu for ease of use. Unfortunately, much as I love Debian and its goals, it's not easy to use. Or wasn't. (might be better now)
I'd be slightly wary of Ubuntu only because it's being kept afloat because the guy in charge is very well off; so it could go away randomly.
I'd be actively avoidant of SuSe, because of who currently owns them.
It should just be as simple as putting a CD (which you will likely have to burn) into a CD-bootable drive on a system with a hard drive, running the install, and answering a few questions.
(so, yes, you should be able to just put it in. Depending on whether or not you are using IDE, and what number of cables you have, there may be issues relating to the jumper settings and locations on the cable for the hard & CD drives; theoretically, though, you should be fine)