Linux Distro for Beginners

"ubuntu seems to have a great community on forums (though I am not an ubuntu user myself, it seems a good choice to begin with as it is a spin-off from the debian project, founded by mark shuttleworth, who was a debian developer back in the nineties)

the learning curve will not be as steep as it used to be, since the internet has grown exponentially in the last 10 years and you can easily find your answers on google.com/linux or on several forums/mailing lists; back then we had usenet, apps mailink lists and, the most important, a guru ... good old times :)"

If you really want to learn your stuff, consider doing the Linux From Scratch thing. Not for using afterwards, mind you, but just to learn how it fits together.

"You can really pick up any distribution and learn what you need to. Personally I use RedHat Enterprise linux at work, so from that bias, I would recommend Fedora or CentOS.

Also, you don't have to find a CLI-only distribution, if you ultimately just want a box with CLI. While Fedora, Ubutnu and the like have all the Gnome windowy stuff installed by default, you don't have to install it. Even if you install it, (at least for fedora) inittab is what is telling it to go to ""X11"". If you change your runlevel to 3... Poof! no more GUI"

"I've learnt an incredible amount using VirtualBox, as it frees you from the worry of wiping your existing OS and coping with the possibility of driver issues. I have used Ubuntu for about 2 and a half years now so I can vouch for that being good, but if you really want to learn all about Linux I think Slackware is a better choice. It's not exactly hard, but it's not newbie-friendly the way Ubuntu is. With Slackware you can guarantee you'll learn a lot if you stick with it, but it'll probably be fairly tough and you'll need to read a lot of documentation.

I also like INX, which is an Ubuntu-based CLI-only distro that offers a virtual machine that will run in VirtualBox. That taught me a fair bit too."