Hi everyone. Im new here so please forgive me if this has already been asked (I did search first but didnt find anything to my liking) or is in the wrong area.

Im currently running WindowsME but I would like to partition my drive and install Linux so that I can setup a web server for testing purposes. Obviously because I posted this in the newbie area I know nothing about Linux. What is the best distribution of for this? Someone recommended RedHat to me but I saw in some threads that Mandrake was recommended for newbies. Im also curious about the whole partitioning thing. I saw that it was mentioned that you could use Partition Magic and then install Linux or use an installer which to my understanding partitioned for you? Is that correct or am I just confused? Which method would you recommend?

if you use mandrake 9 it has parted in it which can resize FAT partitioned drives. I like mandrake 9 although you may want to look at 9.1 which seemed a little bit better to me.

Thanks for such a fast response! Does Mandrake also come with something that allows my computer to be setup so that I can choose to boot using ME or Mandrake?

Any Linux distro will come with the Lilo or Grub boot loaders or both, not to mention Windows can sometimes handle a dual boot.

Try both. I prefer redhat, you may not. Most distros these days will resize Windows ME partitions and setup bootloaders etc automatically.

Awesome. I know nothing about dual booting, is this something I should do some reading up on before hand? And yet another question. My computer specs can be found here, will I have any hardware compatibility issues?

you'll have winmodem issues... there are some lucent drivers out there, but a lot of their winmodems are still unsupported in linux. chances are, this one isn't - other than that tho, hp's pretty good. all the other pieces should work right off the boot.

Do you mean the 56k modem? Im not on dialup, I use DSL.

on dsl you should have no problem but i got a router after dsl and i couldnt get mandrake to connect the internet if you dont have then no problem but iff you have redhat solved y problems and there are some dist which can install winmodem s autmaticly for future use(if you want) for the web server just install the packacges automaticly and start the service most dist should do this automaticly so yuo do not have to do anything for a basic server you do not even need to configure apache files

The DSL goes through a D-Link SWITCH II DSS-5+ is that compatible? Im not terribly knowledgable about routers and swtiches but I know they are similar.

me too but if i were you i would try you just lost an hour to install a dist. then delete and install another one

Can you connect to the internet using RedHat ok? It seems kind of pointless to install Mandrake if I wont be able to connect to the internet with it. But then RedHat doesnt have the automatic partition in the install like Mandrake does right?

the problem with mandrake was in redhat there is option to get the dns setting from server and in mandy i couldnt find that option so i couldnt connect to internet but redhat i got that option and in redhat it will automaticly partion but it will not resize your exsiting fat32 ot ntfs that was my problem

Could you explain that a little more? Im not really sure what you mean. As you can probably guess my knowledge in partitioning is limited as well.

They all have partition resizing and control stuff in them, redhat and mandy are pretty similar feature-wise.

They all resize FAT32, the MDK9.1 beta can resize NTFS as well. It's anybodies guess whether Red Hat will include NTFS resize in 8.1, it depends on some unresolved legal issues.