First, let me give you a quick overview of systems here: (1)
First, yes, Knoppix was the first successful so-called LiveCD distribution. As with anything that succeeds, many now offer liveCD versions (including the ability to launch the installer program if you like what you see). As a matter of fact, the default Ubuntu ISO (a disc image that can be used to create a CD)
is in fact a liveCD.
Red Hat definitely was the big player a few years ago, and through the Fedora project still has a very palpable presence in the distro game, there are other major distros that have made huge headway, namely SuSE (which has also always been somewhat of a popular distro, even moreso after Novell's help) and the newcomer Ubuntu (based off of the Debian lineage with nice tools to make thing more accessible to new users). When people sit down to get familiar with Linux, these are the three that people generally start with. (2)
Finally, unless you wish to keep Windows on there with programs that are no longer available/accessible to you then I would say wipe the drives. Even if you want to keep Windows on the things I'd say start with a fresh install. Of course, if you want to install only Linux then again, wipe the drives. I always like to use one of the liveCD distros to zero out the drive. Is it necessary? by no means, but it makes things nice and clean.(3)
(1): Please do not get offended if you are experienced and feel that I am taking a condescending tone, by no means is this my intent. I just want to be as clear and informative as I can and is reasonable.
(2): All of these distros are freely available for download.
Fedora,
openSuSE, and
Ubuntu. Since you're just getting started, why not download each and give each a go, see which you like the best. Also, a great site for discovering new distros and doing additional browsing is
distrowatch
(3): By zeroing the drive, you make it essentially impossible for the average computer enthusiast to recover any old data from the drive. Moreover, it just prevents issues that may crop up from the old vestiges of what once existed on the drive, granted this is usually only an issue when using a recovery tool when things go south but it's just a good practice. In a liveCD, open a terminal, if the prompt doesn't end with a pound-sign (#), append a
"sudo" in front of the following commands:
[code:1:6810531da7]fdisk -l
//Find the listing that matches the size of the hard disk, take note of the name.
//IDE drives should be of the form /dev/hdX where X is a,b,c...
//SATA and SCSI drives should be of the form /dev/sdX
//For this example, we'll assume the disk is /dev/hda, please replace hda
//with what you find out for your system
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024
//explanation of the command: dd is a data copying and formatting
//command, very useful but can be dangerous in the hands of
//root (the admin account). We are copying from (if= Input File) a zero device
//(a special virtual device that always returns a zero) to the lowest
//level of the hard drive (hda gives you access to the whole drive, there are
//likely to be at least one partitions, denoted by hda1, hda2, etc. in both the
//fdisk listing and in the dev folder. bs=1024 just sets the data
//transaction size to a larger size to speed things up a little.[/code:1:6810531da7]
In any case, if you have further questions/problems, stop on by and we'll be happy to help
:lol: 
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram