ooookay....
Let me rephrase that question so I don't sound like a 14 y.o.
I'm the Admin for a H.S. in southern Maine running a Novell network with about 250 computers (Win95 through XP) and as of next year app. 100 ibooks for the 7th graders. There is a subtle movement toward having Linux servers for the schools due to lower operating costs, so I'd like to get my hands dirty (hence the "play around with") I have TurboLinux Server 6.0 and Workstation cds but I'm not real comfortable with it.
So again...
What would be your advice as to where I should start?

I like Suse. I have the pro version of 8.0 (7cd's). It's was quite easy to configure.
 
I'm sure there are better linux distributions than suse, but you can start here. If you ask me suse is better than mandrake and redhat. Haven't tried debian though.

Thanks Tomay....I'll check it out.

Quote:Hi all. I'd like to play around with Linux. What flavor would you suggest and where would be the best place to download it?
Thanks.


Hi, Once you start playing around with linux you will not leave it. It's so addictive. Download linux for Windows to start with or you can download redhat 8.0 from redhat site. Search on the net for all your queries on linux. You'll find thousands of documents and people to help you.

www.linuxiso.org it's a good site to download distros. Red Hat is tha best.

Just so you know, a lot of Novell is based on Linux, so you can't really go wrong either way. Red Hat is good, Mandrake is good for beginners. If you want a good linux-based firewall, check out www.smoothwall.org for a great way to reuse an old Title 1 computer.

I run Mandrake 9.0 on two work boxes and RH 9 on two more. Both would be good choices WHEN you're ready to dive in. As a safety measure to potential beginners disaster partitioning your hard drive, (and all of us have experienced this in some way or other..), I highly recommend looking at a cd based distro of Linux first. That way you can check out a complete Linux operating system which you boot from a cd. It is also easily downloaded and "burned" in Windows. There will be 0% danger to your hard drive.
 
Knoppix is the most famous of these, but I recommend Morphix-Gnome...
 
http://morphix.sourceforge.net/modules/news/
 
If you like Morphix, you can then install it to HD, or decide on another distro. The Morphix installer is not easy but the advantage is Morphix is Debian based, which makes up[censored], deleting and installing packages via "apt-get" a snap.
 
Here are some others cd based distros..
 
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=cd