Ive run Slack Current on my laptop for quite some time. And I love it. I can't say enough good things. And now I'm ready to kick Windows off my desktop.After several spyware issues, a few viruses, (And yes I run programs that SHOULD stop this), and now IE just not working for any real reason I've decided to kick XP to the curb. Barring one issue. DVD backups.......

Currently I use DVD Shrink to backup DVDs. I'm looking to be able to use something similar. But I can't seem to find anything. Is the best option Wine with DVD Shrink? Anyone know how well it works?

Also all my extra HD partitions are NTFS at the moment. Is Suse 9.1 Pro reasonably easy to set up to recognize them? Or should I convert to another file system? (Honestly keeping NTFS is the EASIEST for me at the moment since one HD is occasionally swapped to my server.)

Anyway, Suse seemed really user friendly while Im learning on my laptop. Any better suggestions?

Basically I burn discs, browse the net, check email, and type and such. Nothing overly special. Any better distro? Thanks for the input guys.

as far as I can tell and I am no expert writing to ntfs is still spotty...I just repationed my 2nd hd to from ntfs to ext 3 for this reason...as to the dvd thing dvd:rip works very well..I used to use dvd shrink as well but I dont bother at all any more

If I were to swap to Fat32 would that be kosher? This drive does get dumped into my server on occasion and Windows 03 is obviously not the best at reading non windows file systems, and I seem to recall Linux being able to, to some degree at least.

And thanks for the info on DVD Rip. Ill definately check it out. Since my Server IS a windows machine at the moment, (Due to software unavailable in ANY linux form) I can always run Shrink from there to make ISOs and drag them over the network to this PC for burning if it comes to that.

Hi.

Linux (at least kernel 2.4 and forward) supports both read and (secure) write to Fat and Fat32. You can read NTFS partitions, but you cannot write secuely ot it (chances are good that you corrupt the filesystem). With Kernel 2.6 the NTFS support has been rewritten, but the NTFS write support is still under heavy development, you can write/replace already existing file on the NTFS file paritition.

Do a search on google.com/linux and you will find the site which hosts the NTFS linux code.

What you are looking for is Captive NTFS:

http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

This project uses Linux-NTFS read support to locate the NTFS driver on your windows partition, encase it in a Linux wrapper, and then write to that wrapper. This gives you (in effect) the official NTFS driver working under Linux. It has a GUI installer that's fairly easy to use. I have played around with it, but I haven't used it extensively as the only dual boot machine I have to test it on is a work laptop that I rarely use.

Hope that helps.