There's also a list of LiveCD distros that may be able to help you make a decision--try out a LiveCD before you install a distro on your hard drive.
** There’s also a list of LiveCD distros that may be able to help you make a decision—try out a LiveCD before you install a distro on your hard drive.**
These are self contained disc systems that will run linux without any change to or use of your hard drive. You just pop th disc in your disc drive and “boot from disc” and you are up and running.
It is slower than an installed version because cd/dvd reads are slow compared to HD reads.
I’d second shadowace’s response. All three should be good for beginners. I’ve recently been playing with Mint in a VM. The ‘live’ CDs are great to see if everything in your computer is compatible. Boot up on the CD, then try different things like playing an MP3, connecting to the internet, and other stuff like that. If everything works, you should be good to go. If your wireless card doesn’t work, (this is a lot less common than it used to be), you might want to google a bit to make sure it can be made to work fairly easily.