Which linux distribution should I choose?

Few people have reccomended fedora 4 , but I have never used linux before so I don't know what to expect let alone which I would prefer, I think redhat aren't supported anymore right? here are all the versions I thinkhttp://www.linuxiso.org/

Do I install my choosen version on the same partition as windows or it's own?
Would be great if I could get a comparison chart and maybe a few suggestions first, too much downloading just to try them all out myself.

#btw what would I download? http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/ #

Fedora Core 4 is a good distro. are you just using it as a desktop? or for a server? or workstation? ? you may want to look in to suse, its pretty easy to use and manage thx to yast.
you would install linux to its own partition, so you'd need free space on your hard drive thats not partitioned by windows (as windows will partition with probably NTFS but plausibly FAT32 and linux doesn't use either of these filesystems).
what kind of processor do you have? you wouldn't download the ppc version. if you have an Athlon 64 then you'd download the x86_64 version. otherwise you'll probably need the i386 version. if you dont know what your cpu is go to start, right click on My Computer and go to properties and it will tell you towards the bottom of the window that appears.

By a workstation do you mean a home network? There are 2 computers that share files on my home network, sometimes 3 (wirless router connects my laptop) don't know what you mean by a server? like hosting files for people to get? Basically I was just looking into a replacement for windows xp pro.
Btw my processor is 64 bit, to be exact its a venice core 3200 64 bit , ive held out getting win xp 64 bit because I heard it's very incompatible .. is this the case for the 64 bit linux?
Hmm disc 1,2,3 and 4 show twice, but according to the faq I don't need the top 4 files, so why are they there? http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/f ... 86_64/iso/

they are there to confuse you. lol anything with srpm in the name is unnecessary by you. i agree with the win xp 64 statement, i once installed it. for about 3 hours. after i was done hating it i reinstalled FC4. lol and theres no comparison between xp & linux, the 64 bit support in linux is rather tremendous. almost all of the software thats available for the 32 bit versions of the distro is available for the 64 bit version of the distro.

Think ill definately go for the 64 bit version, just dont know which distribution yet : )
hopefully encodin movies is a lot faster on the 64 bit platform.

well seeing as your new to linux yes fedora seems to be what everyone recommends for beginners. wouldnt know i never used it. i started with mandrake (now mandriva) and didnt learn crap. it wasnt till i tried debian (sarge) that i learned a bunch. has apt (very great package mangement system which in short manages your programs and stuff) which from what i understand is similar to yast (dont know the differences never used yast but yast is what fedora uses). but anyway ubuntu i would ultimately recomend since its built off debian and is very easy to use. so i would say try fedora or ubuntu. dont like one try the other.

did you not read my post? lol Fedora does not use YaST. suse uses yast. fedora uses yum (at least the 64 bit version does), apt works great for the 32 bit version of fedora but with the 64 bit version, it has both 64 and 32 bit versions of programs which confuses the hell out of apt so it thinks that those packages shouldn't be there and tries to delete half of your os lol but yum doesn't do a bad job with FC4 x86_64, it just doesn't have the gui interface that apt does (synaptic, wonderful program). it has yumex which is comparable, but just not quite there.
although the weird thing is i emailed the current maker of synaptic and he said that it should work fine on the 64 bit version of Fedora. *shrug*

Gonna create a partition for linux now, what size / file system is good? partition magic has several linux file systems here.

i have half of my hard drive (80GB) partitioned for linux. but i'd say at least 20GB. how big is your hard drive?
as for the filesystem, that somewhat depends on the distro your going to install. kinda. you dont really need to partition the free space b/c when you go to install linux, its just going to format the partition anyways so formatting it now isn't going to make any difference. at least i dont think it would. but if you have the choice, you'd wanna go for ext3.

it's 250 gig but I only have 105 free, do I create it as primary or logical?

primary if you can. but the most primary partitions you can have is 3, so after creating it when you install linux it will be modified as the os needs.

so then i'd do like 80GB? maybe 60?

Hmm i'm a bit stuck on checking the sha1sum? of the images I downloaded, was there supposed to be a program to check them with? or do I do it in dos.

there will b no program, you'll have to download a program that will create the sum for you to compare it to the original. check this page out: http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/down ... cker_info/

ah see i thought yast was yum. sorry didnt catch that when skiming through your post. wouldnt know since like i stated never used it before. im gonna give fedora a shot sometime to see why everyone recommends it.

lol ic ic..you should. fedora is a good, clean, stable distro. and the installer is all graphical, its nice. i dont have a problem with text based, i just like the visuals more. lol