I'm planning on downloading Linux to mess around with, my brother uses Red Hat.. but a lot of people say Mandrakes better.
Which do you think is better? (especially for a beginner)

It depends - are you intending to completely re-format your system (or create a 2nd partition) for your Linux installation?

If so, Mandrake is decent for beginners, Red Hat is pretty straight-forward now as well.

If you don't want to disturb your current config, and you don't want to change anything in your Linux config, an option might be Knoppix, which is a CD-bootable Linux distro.

You can also get PhatLinux, which will run as an image from the same drive as your Windows partitions (eg, you don't have to reformat/repartition your hard drive at all).  I haven't used this one recently, but I did try it a couple of years ago.  It worked pretty well at the time.  However, it seems that they now want you to pay for it, and their "download" link wants you to log in to Sourceforge (which I did, but it told me I wasn't a project member, go away).  A bit of Googling gave me this link, but apparently it's 2 yrs old (and in Australia).

I would also recommend investing in a good introductory Linux book - there are a couple published by O'Reilly (I think) which are decent.

There is no more Red Hat as far as your personal distro is concerned, it's turned into the Fedora project. Mandrake is good, unless you have a LG Cdrom, since the kernel sends a Flush_Cache to the drive, and LG doesn't follow the specification for ATAPI for some reason, and it will inturn whip out the firmware. Though I think they released a new build that fixes that. I myself use Gentoo which is a little more advanced(no gui install and it takes a good 5 -6 hours to get it up and running since it's source based). There is Knoppix and there is also Gnoppix, one has the K Destop Enviroment, the other has Gnome. Both of them are Live CDs, SuSE also has a Live CD too.

The one I like the most is Knoppix.  Very easy to use and always install flawlessly (for me at least).  I don't run it from the cd, I install it on my hd.  For some reasons, I have huge problems installing Mandrake (since 9.1).

Yeah I heard about that LG problem. Glad I read about it too as I was thinking of downloading Mandrake and I happen to have one of those drives it would toast.

I was think a bout Linux, but I dont know alot about it. If I have it can I run games on it and other programs like MSN Messanger, and kazaa? and if I have a partition of Windows and linux can I use files for both?

Here's the thing, with NT based Windows OSs, you have the option of using NTFS. It's Microsoft proprietary journaling-filesystem. Well so far Linux programmers have been able to reverse engineer to the point were you can safely read NTFS partitions. However, they haven't figured out the journaling part, so writing to one is still experimental, and you might loose all your data if you tried. If your using a FAT32 patition, then you can read and write without a problem.

There is no MSN Messenger, but there is GAim, which is a multi-user client which supports, AIM, MSN, Jabber, ICQ, IRC etc.

There also is no kazaa but read on for that.

As for games, well there is RTCW, ET, NWN, Savage, Americas Army, Quake 1,2,3, MOH:AA, UT, UT2003 and some others which I can't think of off the top of my head.  It is also possible to get some Windows games under Linux with the use of WINE, I have been able to get STVEF, ST: EF2, JK2, JK3, Call of Duty(All of them without a hitch, you may have to install to Windows first then copy over since Wine has no install shield support). Just about every Quake 3 game will run, I haven't encountered one that hasn't. WineX which you have to pay for, runs more games(not always though) then Wine, but the new release of Wine 20031016 has enable more games to run. It's also possible to get programs like Adobe Photoshop(Disney worked on that one, they use Linux in there animation studios, so does the rest of Hollywood), Kazaa(with WINE), and some other, you'd have to check the App Database at www.winehq.com as to what will run.

Hopes that answers your questions. If your still leary about using Linux, download Knoppix, burn it, and put it in your cdrom and reboot. It's a Live CD, which means it runs off the CD with no installing necessary.

thanx man, you answered alot of questions I had about linux, next format its going on my comp

I like Slack.


although...knoppix IS cool....

speaking of that...

EDIT: this post brought to you in Knoppix.