OK, I'm pretty much a Linux virgin (I know a little, but for these purposes, we'll assume I know nothing).

I want to install Linux onto my home box. I've got 3 distros that came with a book - RedHat 7, Debian, and Caldera... What should I use? Also, how the heck should I go about installing them? Another thing - I've got a USB optical mouse that Caldera doesn't seem to want to when I go through its install (it locks up the system when I try to install the mouse in the distro's installation)? Whazzupwitdat?

Help!

I would recommend RedHat. But is that 7.0 or 7.1? People tell nightmare stories about 7.0 while 7.1 is "widely acclaimed" (I use it). Debian is very elite, but it's quite hardcore to start with (I remember installing Slackware the first time I tried Linux just because I thought I would be able to configure it... I was mistaken).

Caldera.. well, I have prejudices against that. I'm almost 100% sure RH 7.1 would detect your optical USB mouse.

What do you mean with "how to install it"? Do you have a separate hard drive for it, or will you run it on the same as Windows? If that is the case, you will at least need two partitions for Linux, one "normal" and one for swap memory (kind of like RAM that the system will use). You can boot the install off the CD (if your BIOS supports it, you can just insert it and restart, otherwise you'll need to create a boot disk for it).

OK, I guess I shoulda been more specific. The way I'm set up is this - 1 13G HDD where Windows lives. 1 40GB HDD in 3 13GB partitions. I was thinking of installing Linux on one of these... It's RH 7.0... About the install thing, it's mostly the partitioning that messes me up - Linux requires me to repartition and split my existing partition into 2 or 3, correct? Also, one of my problems is my monitor's refresh rate - last time I installed it, I didn't set it right (AFAIK there's no documentation for my monitor with my computer) and couldn't set it again... I can give more if you want...

Ok, first of all, for the distro to use among those three, there's only one possibility: Debian! (you guessed it *g*)

If you can get another distro, use SuSE, that's pretty good, too. SuSE 7.3 will come out soon, btw.

SuSE is one of the most advanced distributions for beginners (together with MDK) and should be able to detect and use all your hardware without problems.

About your partitions:

You need only one partition (for /). But you *really* should use a swap partition, too, of about 100-200mb, depending on how much RAM you have.

You can have more partitions if you want. A good idea is to have a seperate partition for /home, because you can reuse it even after installing a new distro, so you won't have to backup your personal data to somewhere.

For doing the partitons, i recommend partition magic, that's good (the best windows utility, imho).