Hello! I'm thinking of ditching XP Pro for Slackware. I used Slackware once before, and left it when Perl was available on Windows, but now I'm leaning back toward the overall networking and programming flexibility of Linux (although really I'm rather a tyro in these things). But:

In Windows I have become very fond of (a) recording audio from Internet radio feeds, (b) using an editor called Note Tab Light which permits anything copied into the clipboard to be automatically pasted into a file making info gathering easier, and (c) Copernic Desktop Search which gives nearly instantaneous results from a pre-search of the desktop. Am I going to be able to duplicate these things if I dump Windows? I can't really separate out these tasks, as if they were Photoshop or a preferred OCR or something. They are useful all the time.

Thanks for any insights.

I don't think any of these will be problem areas.

A. I've never recorded live streams, but I seriously doubt it will be a problem. Writing streams of data to disk is something usually easily accomplished with linux, especially in varied formats.

B. As far as note-taking apps, if you use kde then basket is a great choice. Also, kde has a clipboard manager which allows a lot of actions to be accomplished with it.

C. Desktop search is coming along; your two main choices are kat and beagle. I use kat (it integrates with kde, and is easier to install) and it looks for file names, metadata, fulltext, etc.

I know you don't want to hear this, but the only way you will find out if linux can meet your needs would be to try. My best guess, given your requirements, would be yes, but you're going to have to take the plunge to find out for sure.

You're quite right! It's a matter of whether I clobber Windows for fun, or go through the bother of keeping it for a while. There are a couple of progs I use under Windows, OCR things, and push come to shove I can run them on another computer for a time. I gotta say though, Win XP is very peppy and I haven't had security problems. Some of the old reasons don't necessarily apply. Still, the programming environment, tyro though I am, is friendlier in Linux.

One other thing that puzzles me. I'm using Slax, (well not at this exact moment), and it can't find my radio and television feeds (www rtve es) and (www elpais es). I take it that Mozilla is better adapted, and that accessing these things won't be a problem for the various sound/image stream programs? The thing is the way the web pages are set up it's not always possible to see what the actual URL is. So if the browser doesn't pick it up and pass it off to a working ancillary program, I'm stuck without my daily dose of Spanish. Thanks for your feedback!