joef

Rob: Raul has some very interesting choices. I'll second the Yoper comments. I tried it on my old PIII 450 laptop that's stuck at 64M of RAM and it ran surprisingly well. If you want a Linux distro that's mostly source-based like BSD, try Crux. It's very quick, though the default window manager is WindowMaker, so that'll always seem faster than KDE, which is what Yoper runs as default. But you have the same ports-like, build-from-sources system without having to start from scratch like Gentoo. And there's Slackware, of course. That's my favorite distro. It's supposed to be the most Unix-like. As for ones I'd like to try, I've always wanted to try one of those Be-like OSes. They seem different enough from Linux/BSD to be interesting. Have fun, joe f.

Jikrantz: Hi. I'm going to give you some different advice, or at least some different options. If you really want a Windows look-alike that's easy, try Lycoris or Linspire or Xandros. You'll have to pay, but they're automatic and very Windows-like. If you search out the cheap Linux CD sites you can probably find them real cheap. The conventional wisdom, however, is to buy a distro with a book and all that. That's how I started. If you want free and very easy, try Suse Linux personal 9.1. It's excellent and freely downloadable (a change for Suse). It's also part of Novell's new Linux empire, so it's got a big dog behind it. The manual in their box set is excellent, too. Borders (or whatever) should have it. If you want to learn something about Linux, load up Slackware. People will say I'm crazy, but I've tried 15 or 20 distributions (I have a spare computer to play with) and Slackware is easily the best. It's simple and dead, rock-solid stable. The only OS crash I've ever had is when I tried to use ATI's drivers instead of going with the Slackware default. Haven't had another crash in, oh, a year or better. And I routinely leave my machine up without a reboot for two or three weeks. And if you want pretty, Dropline makes a tweaked version of Gnome for Slackware that's as pretty as anything out there (and I use OS X at work). Mandrake has never worked well for me. I don't know why, as I've tried it on three different machines, but it just likes to crash more than any other distro I've tried. Fedora Core is very nice, as is Mepis, which has a lot of momentum right now. It's supposed to be as easy as anything out there. I used it for a couple of days, but it didn't do anything for me that my main Slackware box didn't already do. The thing to remember is that any of these distros can be set up to look like Windows. You can configure KDE or Gnome to look and act pretty much just like Windows. Most distros give you more control over your desktop environment than Windows or Mac OS does. I came at Linux from the Mac side, and I've got to tell you, I'm happy. I use it exclusively (though my wife still uses Windows). You can kiss your spyware, malware, etc. woes goodbye (though you can still be hacked if you present a plump enough target). Good luck, joe f.