Re: newbie

[Donald D Henson <wepin wepin com>]

On Sun, 2004-02-22 at 10:54, NeuralDecimation aol com wrote:
>     hello all, i'm having a bit of a problem getting started with gnome. i have a Dell Latitude laptop windows xp professional OS already installed with most likely i386 architecture. i dont know where to go from here. i've tried download sites but i keep getting web pages with errors and such. i have no clue what tarballs are. is there a download site that i can just download the entire gnome package possibly with an .exe extension that'll just simply run/install for me? maybe an image that i can burn to CD for a bootable format? i have no clue what's going on with this stuff. all i know is i want every available options and applications available when i get it installed, the full package;) do i have to download each tarball ( i dont even know if that's correct usage of the term) one by one in order and then install each one in order one by one? thanks in advance for your time and help. 

You need to spend some time reading about Linux and how it works. Someone else already gave you one reference. You can also do a google search for "linux tutorial" which will lead you to some good info. However, the readings can be quite confusing for a newbie. (I was one just a few months ago.) If you're a brave soul, you might want to purchase a Linux distribution (less than $100) which comes with more software applications than you can shake a stick at. I'd suggest SuSE Linux (http://www.suse.com/) but others on this list will probably have other preferences. In your case, you should consider doing a 'dual boot' installation where you have both WindowsXP and Linux on the same machine and you decide each time you boot which one you want. If you decide to go that route, I can give you step by step instructions and I'm sure others on this list will help as well. Good luck.

Don Henson