Need suggestion on linux distro to use!

you could try the live Ubuntu CD to get your feet wet.

clink

 

A newbie's distro, the best: Suse 10.0

A few others for newbies: Fedora Core 4, Mandriva

 

Seconded. Debian in general is excellent, Ubuntu is an offshoot designed with the casual desktop user in mind.

I'd say SuSE is a close second.

-kev

 

I'd go for mandriva 2006, its easy to set up and works very well,

Shadow

 

Do any of these suggestions run an older PowerPC systems, such as the PM 9600?

 

I'm a big fan of Gentoo and LFS (Linux from Scratch).

IMO those two distros are the best ones for learning from, but the installs are most definately not for the faint of heart or for people who hate to RTFM. Granted, if you struggle through it, you'll learn a hell of a lot more than you will by just popping in a LiveCD and fooling around with things. Then again, it will drive you crazy if you're not used to the command prompt (or if you really hate it)

But for starters, you can try Ubuntu or Knoppix, both those LiveCDs are cool. CentOS, Fedora Core, Mandriva, SUSE and Debian are fine as well. If you're not ready to start installing things, there's a huge list of Linux LiveCDs over at http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php so check those out. There's a ton of them, everything from the Slax KillBill LiveCD to GamesKnoppix and others. Just boot from them and you should be ready to go with minimal reconfiguration.

Oh wait, forgot my obligatory *BSD speech too. Then again, OS X would technically fall under that category.

Oh, and don't forget, you NEED to get the PPC version of the installer/CDs/documentation because it will differ slightly from the x86 stuff. Not many distros out there do have PPC versions, but Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo do, and there's also a PPC only distro called YellowDogLinux you might want to check out.

 

Yeah, definitely give live cds a try. That way you can figure out how well it will work with the system you have, see if you really feel like installing it, and go from there.

I've got Mepis installed on my older PC. It has been working well for me, although I must say that I don't use Linux that often. I turn it on every once in awhile to play around, but it's pretty much a geeky little experiment.