Hello,

Thank you for taking the time to take a look at this post. I apologize for my utter lack of programming knowledge and my childlike plea for assistance. Please bear with me while i give some background and our needs. My name is Jim Berry, my son and I are embarking on an around the world trip on electric motorcycles in order to set a distance record for the Guinness record book. My family (wife and three daughters)are coming with us in our support vehicle which is a converted school bus. I hold microsoft in deep disdain for multiple reasons, and am not to wild about apple, but our business has been trapped in microsoft due to our design programs being specific to them.

Since we on this trip are not confined to either OS I want to utilize Linux. The problem is I can and am slowly learning about Linux, I do not understand how to take piece A and get it to work with piece B. I have not chosen any Linux distribution yet as I do not know what is best suited to my application. I need something that will support our printer (an HP officejet pro 8600) I would like to support multiple screens one at a workstation (with a keyboard / mouse) and one at the drivers seat of the bus for navigation hopefully touch screen if possible)which brings up the GPS / navigation option. I see at mkgmap.org.uk and openstreetmap.org that we can make a GPS program to fit our needs but I do not know even remotely how to integrate everything. I also need to run some adobe film editing programs. Is this out of the realm of possibility? Can anyone help? We have a short window (3 months ) to get all of this together, so I would be interested in all the help I can receive or hire someone to compile everything if interested. Thank you for your time and consideration.

I am just going to use two separate computers, one for navigation and the other for film editing, word processing, everyday stuff.

What you want is beyond my realm, but . . .
Perhaps begin here ?

1. Film editing
If you already have Adobe Premiere, stick with it in Windows. Many MS programs will run well in Linux using the Wine emulator, but this isn't one of them. There are alternatives
http://linuxappfinder.com/alternativ...adobe+premiere
but these are probably not good enough for what you need.

2. The map programs
These are written in java, so they'd run on any Linux system with Java installed.

With only 3 months to organise everything, perhaps learning Linux at the same time is not a good idea?

I am not going to become as proficient as you or others on here are, but three months should make me more than aware of how to fumble my way through in an advanced manner

Ubuntu Studio

http://ubuntustudio.org/

Try the live disk first before installing...

There are a few video editing programs

http://ubuntustudio.org/tour/video/

If you are keen to do this, I'd recommend looking for a LUG (Linux User's Group) in your area; that way you'd get hands on help, which could save you a lot of time.
You can look them up in Google, but here's a start http://botw.org/top/Computers/Softwa...d_States/Ohio/

I sometimes come across articles about people who live in the middle of nowhere but are still connected by satellite using Linux. You might want to google them also; I'm sure they have a lot of good advice.

Welcome to LQ and good luck with the trip

(If you make it DownUnder, PM me )


PS: how about talking to the local Universities; they have access to a lot of knowledge. Maybe there's a student looking for a practical MSc topic. Setting you up and supporting you eg via sat-phone would be a good thesis imho.

Also do you have sponsors? Try asking them; maybe they could get some local media publicity and ask for a local Linux expert.

You'll need ruggedised HW.