It depends what you gonna do with your machine. It doesn''t really matter what distribution you use once you know how linux works and how to configure and compile things by yourself.

But since you don''t have so much experience with linux try some bigger distribution like redhat, mandrake or suse. They are easier to install if you are beginner, and will find and correctly configure more hardware then for ex. Slack. They also ship more software on cd''s (since they made more cd''s) so it''s easier to get programms that satisfie all dependencies until you are a bit more experienced and since you don''t wanna have internet on that machine.

Really it isn''t so important which distro u use when it''s come to user friendlyness - almost all distribution today will install either gnome or kde as desktop - and no matter what distributions - gnome is still gnome on either redhat or suse or slack or knoppix or whatever.

What is important is how your distribution manage your system, configure scripts, software and such. When it comes to that I don''t like rehdat coz'' they have changed all script''s to their own. Downside is that if you read how to''s and such on internet they often doesn''t help you coz'' name of scripts are different, they are not in same places etc ... But redhat is not uniqe - same thing apply to suse & mandrake I guess. Fortunately you can today find help for almost every distro - not to mention all "bibles" and such you can buy (or dl on net).

Particulary redhat guys have messed upp gdm''s startup script pretty bad - it''s doesn''t conform at all to what gdm''s docs says.
(gdm is login program that loggs u into an X session and let u choose between dirrent sessions like gnome or kde).

But redhat do nice jobs when it comes to configure hardware - I never had problems with anyithing in my system while in Slack I needed manyally to configure my ethernet cards - and second one still doesn''t work in slack but do in redhat ( I guess the right kernel module isn''t compiled but I don''t care). Even soundcard needed manuall configuration.

If you just want to just install and use linux I would choose some bigger distro like redhat or mandrake coz u can get iso images (for difference of suse) and they will do a lot of thing for you that you don''t really need to be aware of (at least in begging). Second it is easy to recompile programs for your processor beccause they ship alredy prepared source packages that you can recompile and install with one command ( I guess u can do that in suse too ).

you can check this ftp for iso images (it''s pretty fast et nights CET time):

ftp.sunet.se/pub/os/Linux/distributions

they are mirroring a lot of different distributions there so choose one that have iso images.

good luck