[oracle89]

I went to the XP launch in Indianapolis
is kinda.. erm.. what to say
Newriders.com quote ,"Use Linux, get away from gates of ####."
for my opinion is kinda ... cool compare to ME n 98

[Vetritus03]

sad to say that the biggest group of people moving to linux is people who don't want to shell out the bucks to license unix.  the geeky kids get it cause it's a FAD.  ####, i bought a copy for the manuals and such... never did get it to run.  i got bored trying.  of course i had USB everything and dual displays and such which my reh hat 6.2 didn't support... but that's another story.  until linux can be installed with a few mouse clicks and work with nearly EVERY piece of (realtively new) hardware it's installed on and "just work" like Xp does... there really isn't going to be a market out there for the average home user.  M$ knows this.  if they thought linux would take over, there'd be a M$ distro of Linux... or they'd just buy it up.  you know them... they're crazy... they'd do it.

[Null and Void]

Try Mandrake, it's meant for the average home owner (you can download it even). I personally use Slackware, it's too difficult for the average person, but if you have half a clue it's easy to install. The Red Hat 6.2 installer sucked (I've tried a whole lot of distro's, including that one, so I know ;)).

[oracle89]

yeah my friend got mandrake installed, and its kinda cool i think

[Vetritus03]

you're taking the ease of install angle... what about compatibility?  i want to run Office without configing an emulator.

[Null and Void]

Star Office, KOffice, Gnome Office, take your pick. They're all easy to install (Star Office 6.0's install has NO COMMAND LINE stuff, it is seriously idiot proof). Star Office really is easy, and can open all of the Word 2000 documents I've tried. KOffice is a little buggy. Gnome Office is a whole lot of programs (none of which are made by the gnome team that I know of), I've only tried Abiword (it is pretty nice also). Slackware 8.0 has worked fine for everything I've tried with it (the NVidia drivers worked, Star Office installed, Anjuta installed, I upgraded X, et cetera).

[Vetritus03]

ok, here's my setup at the moment.

Gateway Solo9300
8x DVD
20Gb HDD
3.5 floppy
544Mbs RAM
3Com PCMCIA fast ethernet
actiontec 56k modem
ati rage mobility graphics
ESS Maestro audio

a mini-docking station
USB Zip250
USB Zip650 CD-RW
HP 932Cse printer

i run flash and dreamweaver mostly
use office Xp (2k is close enough)
various games... no worries there.

how much of this stuff would work if i say... wipe it out and install... say... mandrake cuz i'm lazy.

windowsXp was plug and play.  no drivers required.  (98/ME needed drivers for everything... driver installs aren't a problem in Win9x)

my quesion is... how hard would it be to get it all working... and play it dumb.  i've never touched linux for real.  never touched a unix box.  how hard will it be?

[Null and Void]

If you've never used a Unix before, I highly discourage dropping Windows 100% (they take a while to figure out, to be honest). PCMCIA has to be compiled into the kernel, I'm not sure if most distro's ship with it already built, but my guess is they would. Getting networking setup in Linux is easy unless you have a winmodem (it doesn't look like you do). I don't know about your sound card, I don't know if there are drivers for that one (you'd have to check, I just really don't know, sound blasters are easy though). I've never setup USB in Linux, I can't comment on that (I'm pretty sure it isn't hard, but my current mobo is the first mobo with USB I've ever owned). I've never setup my printer in Linux either (it's way different than yours anyway, so it wouldn't help you to give you an analysis).

You can look here for some tutorials on setting up hardware (et cetera): http://www.linuxnewb...dw...index.html

If you have a spare hard drive or partition you can install Linux without killing Windows. It really does take a while to learn it well, until then I caution you not to kill Windows (I'm just being honest here :)).

[Null and Void]

One thing I forgot to say: I don't know how much of that hardware Mandrake will setup on its own. I haven't fully installed Mandrake before, I've just messed around with the installation program.

[Vetritus03]

dude... never had a MBD with USB before?  that's been around since the late pentium class CPUs... came standard on almost ALL P2s... what gives?  never set up a printer in linux before?  ok.  mind made up.  WindowsXp the OS for me.  :)

[The Neoracle]

Just to let you know Vetritus, If you had the equivilent in Mac, it would all work in OS X 10.1 and you'd have the stability of BSD with the awesome OS X interface.  It's a sight to behold.

[Vetritus03]

i've seen pictures.  have i ever said anything truly distasteful about a Mac?  i'd buy one.  if i had the $ to do so.  the real thing holding me back is trying to buy software for both platforms.

[Null and Void]

Well, my printer is on my (my as in not quite mine, but in the house) other computer and I've never wanted to set it up on this computer. Sure, it shouldn't be hard, I'm just being honest and saying I've never done it :).