Crossing over...

[pondscum]

I use windows, yes I am windows media center pondscum. I know nothing about linux or how it works. I want to cross over to the darkside , please point me in the right dirrection. where can I start? what should i know? and what about Fadora 5 ? any good, i installed on old laptop, cant get internet to work, or anything else for that matter. and how about dual booting? how does that work, can I keep windows and run linux aswell on same pc? Please help...... I'm green as grass, water me.

[JamminJoeyB]

Welcome to the wonderful world of Linux.

While many will tell you Fedora is a fine distro, maybe we should point you to the iso confused forum here at JL. Many have found the answer to thier question there. Or maybe a mod will just move it for you.

I will say this much. You managed to get a distro installed on an old laptop. Well to get better help you need to follow the posting guidelines http://justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=91067

Also searching before you ask is very helpful. Many problems have been solved here already and if they weren't completely solved there are many helpful hints in those threads to help you trouble shoot further.

Yes dual booting is easy with linux, many here do it. I know for a fact that a google/linux search for "dual booting windows linux" will turn up a couple of great articles and howtos.

BTW hardware specs really help when trouble shooting any problem.

[infiniphunk]

I want to cross over to the darkside...

Just for the record, you're joining the good guys here. M$FT is the evil empire.

[nabetse]

Wow, Starwars is a pretty good analogy to the situation.

Gates is Palpatine
Balmer is Vader
and the entire free / open source community is the rebellion.

Microsoft has 90% of the market and the Empire, 90% of the galaxy and open source/the Rebellion is diffused throughout the market/galaxy with no attackable central location.

Microsoft/the Empire would like nothing more than for people to believe that open source/the Rebellion is evil or inconsequential.

Back to the subject: Congrats for joining the good guys. If you're comming from a strictly Windows background, you're probably going to need to learn a bit before you're going to feel comfortable in the Unix/Linux world. It's not that hard; it's simply different. (Actually the structure of Unix/Linux makes much more sense than Windows.) Much of my own frustrations came from wanting to do things the same way as windows. Read around. Most of the distro homepages contain pretty decent documentation. If you need more info, search this site, or search Google.

[crow2icedearth]

It's not that hard; it's simply different

Just a huge learning curve, would say learning gnu/linux is hard , i would say its more timie consuming then learning windows. If you want to learn how to setup server such as SSH , BIND , APACHE , NIS , NFS , SAMBA , SENDMAIL , you will send alot of time learning just those applications. You will also spend alot of time if you learn system admin . Depends how you use gnu/linux. if you run it as a desktop system with x windows and use that it wont be to hard.

[crow2icedearth]

and gnu/linux is the not the evil empire.