I feel your pain. Have been eager to try Linux but have been too busy keeping XP going so I can blog, ebay and the kids can do homework and IM!

Pick up a copy of Computer User and you will see lots of ads for places that fix stuff. General Nanosystems down a few blocks from KSTP is supposed to be good. You can haul it in and they will get at it right away as you watch.

The answer to all your questions my friend is contained in one word. Mac.

As for your XP CD? Gone, disintegrated. Part of the copy protection.

Mitch,

Without question, you want Fedora Core Linux. It's very user friendly, and I used it to teach myself linux about a year ago. Best of all, it's FREE for download at http://fedora.redhat.com/

Now, I am using Fedora Core 1 (there are now 4 I think), and that's really the only one I suggest. I warn you, it's very difficult to find the 3 source disks for this now. If you really want, I'd be MORE than happy to burn you copies of all 3 and mail them to you, just email me some details and I'll get right to it.

Bottom line, it's worth it. I have been micro$oft free for 8 months now...and lovin' it! You're NOT going to sit down and get it all figured out in one evening, but patience and http://linuxquestions.org are your two best friends.

Laptop repair I may be able to do myself, depending on the problem. If it needs new mechanical pieces, such as a connector or drive bay door, I won't pretend I'm your guy. If it's just running like crap, I am most certainly your guy. Again, email me if you're interested. I'd fix it up for free, seeing as you're donating so much of your time for all of us.

Lastly, I think you put your XP install CD in the garbage, er, that's what you SHOULD have done with it. Seriously though, if you need a copy of that, I can be of assistance there too, but you didn't hear that from me :-)

I've got XP Pro with service pack 2 included...

The beauty of Linux is that if you install Winblows XP first, you can install Linux along side it and choose which you want to run at boot time. Very nice for those not ready to be completey Winblows free. Mind you, you must install XP first, as Micro$oft will overwrite any of your other OS's boot info upon installation. Thanks Micro$oft!!

Good luck, email me if needed...

Jeff

Wow, look at all the M$ haters.

First off, I run an international network that includes MS NT4 - 2000 and 2003 servers. I have Windows 2000 and XP clients. We don't experience all of these problems that I see posted on so many sites.

A properly installed and configured XP PC along with some common sense and you would not be at the end of your XP rope.

How you people manage to get your XP so screwed up is beyond me other than stupid sloppy computer management and moronic internet FREE software installs.

When you install those freebie web install programs like Weatherbug etc. you are allowing these crappy companies to infiltrate your systems and flood you with spyware and worse, maleware. Read the fine print before you click Yes.

Do you use Windows Update to patch your systems regularly? Most don't even know what I am talking about. This evil M$ company knows it's the biggest target in the world but guess what - they actually create patches for their products and if you set up your PC properly it will get these patches for you.

Linsux doesn't do that. Why don't you hear about people hacking Linsux? Well, they actually do but since Linsux is on so few PC's it's not worth reporting to the mainstream.

Let's all run down the Macincrap road now too. They actually report their bugs too but it takes Scrapple weeks, sometimes months to create a good patch for their OS. Then again, if I am a punk ass kid who wants to create havok am I going to write hacks for Macs or Windows?

Now I am not really against Macs or Linux I am just tired of really stupid people running down XP because they are too stupid to install it properly and they are morons who like to install maleware because they can't find www.weather.com to get their local temp.

Also M$ has a free beta Anti-Spyware tool that works quite well and will warn you before you allow something like WeatherBug to be installed.

That being said Jeff is right. The Fedora Redhat is the friendliest of the Linux products to learn from and they have a good patch resource at their website along with good links for learning and maintaining your OS.

Agreed--I used Red Hat briefly when I still had a PC, and I enjoyed it immensely. The version I used was plug-and-play within reason (it had trouble with my generic 802.11b card) and easy to use, though deathly slow on my pentium II laptop. Macs are fine, but not if you don't want to "invest" in new hardware.

If you just want to try linux, look for Knoppix - they have a 'live' cd (runs linux without installing) and I've successfully run it on both my old Celeron laptop and my AMD64 desktop.

As far as repair goes, without question my favorite store in the metro is General Nanosystems (http://store.yahoo.com/gnstest-store/index.html). Give them a call. Bet they can help.

Steve

I admittedly agree with Alan that you can very "easily" maintain a system running XP without many problems, if you know what you're doing and (I'll reiterate Alan's point here as it cannot be stressed enough) don't get sucked into installing cute little programs from the web.

In Linux's defense, though, I must correct the satement that no patches are offered for the various flavors of it. Almost every (and perhaps every) version has one utility or another that allows you to update, regularily, not only the OS itself but most of the installed software as well. RedHat, for instance, give you a utility that sits on the taskbar (or dock if you prefer) and alerts you when updates are available, very much like windows' windows update...

Linux just allows (or forces?) the user to get to know his/her PC better, lets you easily mess around with new areas like scripting and task automation without harm of doing irreversible damage, and once you get to know all this you find it offers some of the coolest utilities (many preinstalled) that you could imagine, most of which can be used from the command line and are therefore very, very quick.

I'm sure Windows allows much of this kind of thing, but the average user wouldn't want to try and self-teach oneself for risk of trashing the system. Oh, and you have to suffer through the DOS command line crappy syntax thing...

And then there's the fact that, while some out there do still attempt to hack the linux world, the vast majority of attacks and viruses are designed strictly for windows based machines and have no effect on a linux box. Securing a linux system is easy as pie, and the occurance of newly discovered security flaws are few and far between...

I'm sorry. I'm not trying to turn this into a Windows vs Linux discussion. I just intended to clear up linux's lack of automatic patches issue...

Knoppix is good for a test drive. I'd had a bit of fun trying to figure it out.

Another one that is starting to make the rounds is Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntulinux.org), which also has a liveCD and was able to auto-detect a crapload on my computer that no one linux Distro has yet. The "Full Install" is only 600MB, so if you want to get up and running, that may not be a bad choice.

As for the XP discs, can't help ya. However, after just upgrading to XP (I know, I know), I'm finally not as angry at Windows as I used to be. I'm sure I'll find a reason soon, but it's still good for now.

http://tinyurl.com/dun68

My answer: MEPIS
(visit http://www.mepis.org )

I think Mepis is the Linux distro that is easiest to install and use, "with no monkeying around".

It has a very user-friendly approach, based in large part on the fact that they don't try to cram every possible package into it; they've made some sensible choices about what an average user will need. Because it's Linux, you can still add to it, to your heart's content. (see apget for easy updates)

It comes up, out of the box, with a sensible set of icons on the bottom row (task bar? panel?) all set for real users.

I've wrestled with the redhat, fedora, suse, knoppix, and others. They're good for developers and sys admins who want to have a lot of admin work. But you gotta try mepis - it comes as a live-cd, so that you can boot from the CD without installing it. When it comes up, the desktop includes an icon on which to click for installing it to your hard drive if you so desire.

There's even a book - Point and Click Linux - that PrenticeHall published, by one of the founders of Slashdot, based on Mepis, intended to help de-mystify Linux and its applications. Very readable, maybe too elemetary for you, Mitch.

I have a few different versions of Linux at home, but I run Mepis on my laptop. I haven't yet tried Ubuntu, so I can't compare, but for now my vote is still with Mepis.

Good call RBMN, Mandrake is the perfect distro for a new user. Wonderful plug and play support, easy install, and I *think* you may be able to run it off the CD as well...

I use Ubuntu now, after going from Red Hat to Mandrake to Debian (hell, I don't think there's a major Linux distro I haven't tried.)

All distros have their own plusses and minuses, and there really isn't a "right" answer for which one works best. I like Ubuntu, and it's quickly become the hottest distro on the scene. It's fast, easy to use, and installing it isn't a pain.

LiveCDs are very nice - they let you play around with a distro, make sure it plays nice with your hardware, and once you know that it works, you can make the leap to a full install.

I'll chime in here, too. I've been using Linux since, well, let's just say I saw Linus' original announcement and decided to keep running Mach386 until he could run gcc correctly.

Anyway, I like to show off Knoppix to newbies, but I generally try to install Mandrake as a first time setup. It's very simple to use and install and has very good support for all the hardware I've ever tried it on. While it's not as secure as the others it's still acceptable. Ubuntu is good and popular and my second choice, Redhat Fedora would be my third (although that's what I run, but I don't think you want the learning curve there -- I've been running it for more years than I want to count). I hate to admit it, but I've been running XP much more often than I'd like because of work and it's the first version of Windows I view as acceptable.

You know, folks who think Linux is hard to install have never tried to install WinXP on a dual boot system. The Windows installer is pitiful compared to many of the Linux distros and it's a pain to have to go and buy Partition Magic or something liek that if you want to run Win98 (for the kids' games) and XP and/or Linux.

I tried to do a Red Hat/Win2K dual boot install once. It was a disaster.

Not to say I won't try it again.

Wog: GNS is great, but they don't do laptop work. I swear by them for all things desktop.

Your best bet is to join a local linux user's group. They'd be glad to help you pick a distribution, install it and keep it updated.

As far as the 802.11b support goes (and many other hardware items), you should check what hardware is supported and how well before buying an interface. Many hardware vendors don't like to make their specs public so linux doesn't support them well. I recently went through this trying to buy a scanner. In any case, my D-Link card (802.11g) works fine using the madwifi drivers.

I run Gentoo on four workstations at home and my laptop. I've had no problems configuring hardware except for my oldest system which is giving me problems running the 2.6 kernel (it runs 2.4 just fine). I've never had to hunt down patches to get something to work and software updates are easily applied. I'm not sure I'd recommend this to someone with no unix experience, though. You might do well with SuSE. I also concur that a live CD would be a great way to get your feet wet while trying it out.

I've got the Debian "Testing" distro, aka "sarge", aka "3.1" on my desktop & the latest version of Gentoo linux on my laptop. Both of them are better than XP (I've got XP on a partition on the desktop fpr playing games) but neither Linux distro is really suitable for someone who "just wants it to work". For example, I've gotten the mozilla mplayer plugin work mostly on the desktop & not all on the laptop, meaning no windows streaming audio on the laptop. The NA radio show may be great or sucky; I don't know, I can't listen to it. I've got the mplayer source & I could recompile with gcc -g, put it on the debugger, find the bug, fix & recompile the source, but who has the time for that?
I use linux at home because we use Solaris @ work and it makes it easier to move projects back and forth.
My next computer will probably be a Mac.

Sorry, Debian is good for very experienced folks, open source purists, and masochists. It's the distribution that makes everything else seem easy to install. It's not for Mitch as a Linux newbie.

SuSE isn't bad, but it's on the order of Red Hat for difficulty. I like SuSE and Debian if they're professionally managed, but for standalone and/or introductory systems they're not the best. Remember, Mitch did Linux and backed off RH as frustrating (no offense, it took me a while to become used to it as I'd been running Slackware for forever before RH even came into existance).

Remember folks, we're talking gentle intro here, not something to make him regret the experience. It's one of the reasons I start folks with Mandrake until they get more experience. I don't run Mandrake, but I respect the work they've done to making the setup easier for folks.

But Mitch, you really ought to take Thomas' advice and go a users group and have someone set you up the first time or get a Linux enabled friend to help you. It'll make your life a lot easier. But take notes as to what the guy did, since you're likely to want to change it a bit or redo it as you experiment. Remember that with a reasonable boot manager like grub you can boot many different OSes so once you have everything going you can keep installing different versions of Linux off the side to try them out. But get things set up the first time to check them out before you get fancy.

Mandrake, for sure. The most recent installs have gotten easy enough for an eleven-year old. (And I'm not talking about a techie/geek kid, either.)