Replies

Wasted:

Linux as an operating systems comes in different ‘distributions’ (Distro). A Distro is basically just a collection of different software packages like the OS itself (Linux Kernel and GNU Libraries), a ‘windows’ environment, browser, office suite, and other packages. really the difference between two distro’s is usually in the target audience. One might be aimed at power users and has alot of server software (Life RedHat / Fedora / Suse), others are aimed at the desktop and focus more on the look / feel / Ease of use (Ubuntu / Mandriva).

One of the most user friendly distro’s is Ubunu which can be downloaded here (http://www.ubuntu.com/) Download it, burn it to a cd and start your computer up. It should boot off the CD and bring up ubuntu, you can try it out like this without uninstalling windows. To get back to windows simply restart the computer (taking out the CD which should eject when you run shutdown)

If you like what you see you can install off of the same CD.

Incidentally, if you are a gamer Linux will likely not be for you, while there are ways to run some windows software under Linux it tends to affect performance enough to bother gamers (if it will run at all).

I would just need it for personal home use. I see here that Firefox works on it, and I also know that a filesharing program I use is also compatible with Linux. I would also need a foreign AOL (not bound by AOL TOS rules).

Could I burn Ubuntu onto a regular 800MB/70 minute CD?

About gaming on a Linux system though.... I learned recently about a product which is a tuned version of WINE called Cedega. Their homepage is at -

http://www.cedega.org

I played Battlefield-II on my buddy's Ubuntu 7.x Linux box using it and there was NO difference from Windows! We tried it on BOTH operating systems! I think there's a $15 fee to receive Cedega updates, but friends of mine who are gamers say it's WELL worth it.

If you're "hardcore" you can always download the Cedega sources and compile and install it.