Surf with a Linux LiveCD to avoid a lot this headache.

Anyway, to get back on target:

The LiveCDs that I recommended Knoppix, Kanotix, Slax, PCLinuxOS, Mepis, Ubuntu/Kubuntu will detect all of your hardware unless you have a weird, weird piece of hardware. Even then you can get help in the respective forums. As far as the person with a NIC not being detected, that is odd, uncommon and I suspect that he/she did not choose the right option when installing for the NIC configuration. Proprietary onboard NICs can be a problem for a short while after the motherboard release... I had that with the Nvidia NIC on nforce2 board.

Anyway, the beauty of those CDs are as follows: You can surf with abandon, you can thoroughly test the apps. You can play with synaptic and apt-get (the upgrade and software installation apps). Someone wrote a nice "apt-get primer", try googling for it. Your windows partition, hard drive, in fact are safe and unscathed. If you like what you are using, you can install it.

As for software questions implied or addressed in other posts: there are word processors (like 15 or more, abiword and OpenOffice being the most used), media players, DVD players, CD players, browsers (all of the usual suspects but IE), spreadsheets, presentation (like Powerpoint) and there are no hoops to jump through just links to click. Either you click Open Office under "Applications" or the like. Really easy. I can not speak for Content Creation software or that kind of thing, but the work-a-day apps are good.

I do not know much about Linux security. However, the IT guys at my company started using RED HAT Linux at home and hardly ever boot into Windows. They are fairly paranoid as far as I can tell so I would suspect that Security can not be any worse than windows, which sucks, this site as a clear testimony. The recommended minimum accepted security being 6 programs installed along side of a customized browser according to one of the site experts (LongSpear) and medium security recommendation is 20! plus a customized Firefox (Moox). Ultimately, this whole thing will vary according to a person's needs, system, experience, willingness to try something new, etc...
I keep seeing a post from a "pornsurfer": if you read this thread, you of all people should definitely consider a LiveCD like these. You are prancing around in a prison with a pink thong on, euphemistically speaking, by surfing porn with windows. Risky behaviour.

 

I feel very much like you. I tried Mandrake, RedHat, and eventually Suse 7.2 a few years ago on an old 233 AMD machine. With a lot of help from various forums I managed to get everything working including linking to my Windows machine, but it just ran so slowly. This was installed on h/d. No one I spoke to could offer a reason for this. I played around with it for about 4 months then dumped because I plain did not like it. That is not to knock Linux, it just did not suit me.

I have too many windows programs that are just not available in it or they do not work in a way that I like. Some programs were impossible to run due having to compile them then finding they won't because some libraries are not present, or if they are then not where they expect to find them. You need to be too much of a programmer to understand what is going on.

I eventually installed Win 2k on that m/c and it ran faster than Linux. Swore never to go there again.

 

I downloaded the Mepis iso, burned a CD and had fun playing with Linux - even installed it to my hard drive. It is relatively easy to install, but still requires knowledge and time to get it up and running. But the Live CD is easy to give a feel for Linux.

To Chuck57, some of your comments remind me of my own and I am doubtful, Linux will be sufficient to eliminate Windows. I began my computer experience with the Commodore 64, then various Amigas, before finally giving in to the abundance of hardware and software available for the PC.

If I were 20 or 30 years younger, I would probably be right into Linux, now I want to point and click, and I don't want to be typing commands, remembering various options, forgetting to include a space, or typing an "m" rather than an "n" and wasting time figuing why the command will not work --been there, done that. Linux is certainly not without point and click, but to really use it, typing commands is almost a given.

Although there are many apps for Linux, the real biggies for me (Premiere, Vegas, SoundForge, Photoshop, etc.) are not available, at least as far as I have been able to discover. There are attempts to run some of the big Windows apps in Linux (Photoshop), the results I have read have been mixed, at best.

But easy to download a Live CD and try for yourself.

 

I debated trying Slax, but with dial up, a minimum 10 hr download just offers to much room for something to screw up. I played with slackware linux yrs ago. Just couldn't get into it.

 

FanBLOODYtastic m8

I tried linux a couple of years ago and spent 2 weeks trying to connect to the internet and got absolutely nowhere with connecting and pretty much anything else i tried.

I am now typing this using the pclinuxos live cd.

Cheers for this, i am now gonna install this on a sepeate partition

 

at the risk of sounding stupid, have any AOL users tried these livecds? I ask because i can imagine quite a few problems! For instance, even though PCLinuxOS comes wirh firefox, how do i get the AOL dialler to work which is what i would need to connect (modem). Other than this issue, i really wanna give it a go!

F.

 

That's a good question Flash12 and I'm wondering myself about that. Though, I seem to doubt that you would be able to connect if you had AOL dialup, unless there is a Linux compatible AOL dialup program available that you could put on the cd. And I don't think you can use the Windows DUN to connect, or anything similar, so it seems to me that the only way to connect would be with a AOL dialup program that is compatible Linux. Of course if I'm wrong someone please correct me.