Where to get free linux OS

[Sivaraman Lakshmanan]

Hi All,
I am new to linux world. I want to install Red hat linux in my PC. I have Red Hat linux 9.0 CD but during installation it's asking for some more drivers. So I am confused. If someone can give me a link to full copy of Red Hat linux which include all the drivers as well that would be great.

Thanks in Advance.

[Joe Ess]

Woah! Red Hat 9 was discontinued years ago. The closest thing to a free Red Hat Linux is the Fedora Project. A community effort sponsored by Red Hat. Be warned, Fedora is a bleeding-edge distribution. It is very current, but also occasionally buggy.
If you are just starting out, you may want a more stable "desktop" distribution, like Ubuntu or SUSE. Distrowatch has links to reviews and the various download sites. Most of these distros have bootable CD's available so you can test drive before you install.

[Arun Kumar]

Hi I am also new to linux I downloaded Ubuntu It is really great and simple

just have a look at http://www.ubuntu.com/

[Tim Holloway]

Actually, about the closest thing to a free "Red Hat" Linux is CentOS or something like it. Built from the RHEL sources. Fedora is "from" Red Hat, but isn't (until they change their minds again) an actual Red Hat release.

Most modern systems are pretty standard on hardware and shouldn't need extra drivers. That wasn't so true back when RH9 was the latest model and you'd buy servers from Compaq with their off-the-wall proprietary SCSI drivers. And when even the more-or-less standard Adaptec drivers were on an "extras" disk.

So you may get around the driver problem just by upgrading to CentOS. If not, you'll probably need drivers from your hardware vendor, rather than from Red Hat.

[Cameron Wallace McKenzie]

I went to install Linux the other day, and started with Red Hat. I gave up after three millions screens and no idea what to do to download it.

Then I went to OpenSuse and found the link right away. The install was so simple, it was amazing.

You should check it out.

Cheers!

-Cameron McKenzie

[Sivaraman Lakshmanan]

Hi all,
I found the problem. The problem is Red hat is not able to find my hard drive. I have 80Gb hard disk, I am planning for a dual boot. So 70GB I left and widows and 10GB I left unformatted so that Red hat can detect and use it. But unfortunately Red hat is not able to detect.

Please Help

[Joe Ess]

First, I will repeat my recommendation that you use a modern Linux distribution. Red Hat 9 is no longer maintained so you will not be able to get help, bug fixes or security updates. Newer software will have problems running on RH9 because it is compiled against newer libraries. Any of the above recommendations will be far better in any category than Red Hat 9.
Next, as for your problem, what do you mean you left 10GB "unformatted"? You will need to create a seperate partition for Linux. Did you do so?
Be aware that Linux will designate your hard drive and partitions differently than Windows. The first hard drive is hda, the second hdb and so on. The partitions are designated by numbers after the drive names, like hda1 for the first partition on the first drive, hdb2 for the second on the second and so on.