I decided to take Mrk's advice and have a look at some of the distros in the popularity list on distrowatch. I chose Mepis, downloaded the iso and had a play with it. It was so different to me from the few others I have tried (puppy, mint and ubuntu.) In some ways it was like windows in that my little network icons were flashing as soon as it loaded, but it took me nearly 15 minutes to find my own music from the hard drive to play in Amarok There was no mount icon!! There seems to be more work to do in this as not so many things are loaded on bootup from the cd, you have to find them However I have really enjoyed playing with this,(am using it to post this) Being fairly new to linux I am a bit limited in what I can do just yet.
If you can wait some 2-3 weeks or maybe even less, you'll get a mepis tutorial. It's written already, alongside another 37 articles , and it is 15th on the posting list. Mrk
Have you tried latest Ubuntu Intrepid, its quite fast for boot up and file access and the interface is quite simple even for shared files, also sharing files is no issue, you can do it via GUI, no need for config files etc.
I have tried ubuntu 8.04, will try the one you suggest. I haven't installed any yet, just running them via live cd's. Thanks
Quite a different beast, much faster overall and more optmized, if you have x64 CPU, strongly suggest you try out the x64 version.
Am currently using Ubuntu 8.04 32 bit OS (CPU = 64bit) and would be interested to know whether all those progs. that I am now able to install from the repos will also work if I switched to the 64 bit version of Ubuntu. Or would one often need to revert to forcing the install like this: sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture prog-0.xx-i386.deb (where xx is prog. version). In order to make it work one would need to probably also install some or other lib? package?
I am trying the ubuntu intrepid now as I type. Network and printer all automatically found. I can see why this would appeal to people. However I liked mepis more (even though it couldn't use my printer) in fact I liked puppy more!! No reason, just the feel of it I guess.
Everything works, now with Flash and Java plugin available in x64, you don't have to install any x32 stuff via the force method or through the nsplugin way.