For home users?

damnyanks

Hey,

I'm putting together what should hopefuly be a low cost machine for one of the family members. Was wondering if anyone would have any suggestions as to what distribution of linux I could use.

I'm clueless in all the types that exist. I'd be looking for something that could run a browser / mail, open office and hopefully play some games.

Any recomendations / links?

Red Alert

Well if you're new to Linux, then Mandrake or preferably Fedora will probably do the trick. If you yourself are a bit more linux versed then by all means Gentoo or Slackware will allow you to customise it more for the intended user.

seanos

Couldn't agree more - Fedora, especially now with FC2's release.

I've used Linux for couple years, and like FC[RH] a lot.
http://fedora.redhat.com/


A nice introduction to whole Linux thing is Knoppix, which just boots from cd - good to show off Linux at least, or get them to step into it as opposed to throwing 'em in the deep end.
http://www.knoppix.org/

They would be my main recommendations ... as for games, There are nice ones that come with both those distributions, as for commercial games ... em, good luck ?
[www.tomsharware.com has some recentish articles on getting games working; UT and the likes, under Linux - may be interesting/informative read]

damnyanks

Ah I was under the impression linux had a good few commercial games working for it. Although it is a "budget" machine so wouldnt be capable of playing the latest. But having a choice would of been nice

Thanks for the inof

Ste-

I still consider myself quite the newbie to Linux.
Knoppix is great and you should have anyway just in case Windows ****s up.
Saturday just gone I got Doom running I thought it was great. Frozen Bubble is another great game.
Don't knock Linux on the head just becauser it dosn't run the latest games.
Try it and see what you can get running. The sense of achievement is brilliant.

zAbbo

Once you get 3d acceleration working you`re sorted, the easiest game to run is perhaps Quake3, which has a host of mods where im sure you could find one you like, also theres a thread called "Free Games" in the games forum where most of the games are available in linux.

Check out www.happypenguin.org every week or so to find some new and great gaming projects

nadir

gentoo is the way to go, its a bit of a complex install, but the installation documentation is comprehensive and step by step, you can also use kernel gaming sources, or the latest 2.6 gentoo dev sources (reccomended). Also there is quite alot more gaming support these days that a few years back. On my gentoo system, I have Unreal Tournament 2003 , quake1, quake3-osp, Army Operations Recon(my best native linux game),a whole host of emulators and old games (doom,wolf, .etc), a good variety of open source games , parsec .etc. And steam through winex ( conter-strike, HL, DOD .etc. Ill be grabbing myself a copy of farcry now aswell, sing is its supported in wine.