Ok guys, this isn't even slack related in any way, but I feel most at home in this forum. A good friend of mine whom runs Windows XP home keepd getting viruses. Not just any old viruses either, I am talkin the ones that disguise themselves as windows security alerts and once you click on em you're done for. I have wiped his HD clean and fresh installed windows on his computer, installed ALL MS updates, Norton antivirus, and windows defender. and without fail a few weeks later he has these viruses again. He asked me what I do in this case an I said, well Tom I don't get viruses or spyware because I use Slackware Linux. When I was explaining to him about Slackware (The only distro I know, and the only one I love) he seemed interested, but was concerned about learning how to use it (as he isn't very computer literate) I told him about some of the Live CD's that are out there and he was even more interested. My question is this: What distro, on a LIVE CD would be good to present to him to see if he would like to run that instead of windows.

Thanks for any advice

--Paul--

Any of various distros on LiveCD will give a good first impression: Ubuntu, Mepis, PCLOS, OpenSUSE

Be sure that he realizes that running on Live CD will be slooooooowwwww

Thanks for the suggestions, I have been reading a little and I think I am going to take OpenSUSE and PCLOS to him, they seem to look fairly simple for the average joe.

I wish I had the knowledge to inform everyone how to use Slackware, IMHO, its the best and has treated me very very well. There is absolutely nothing I can't run in Slackware that I can run in Windows.

If you want a faster live CD try Accelerated Knoppix:
http://www.alpha.co.jp/biz/rdg/ac-kn....html#download

However, it is made by the Japanese and you should boot with 'boot:knoppix lang=us' for english. Unfortunately, there is still some Japanese left scattered about. Too bad, but if he doesn't mind it, it runs very fast because the ISO image is optimized to minimize seek time.

Now, many live CDs support the 'toram' option that will load the image into RAM ... assuming he has enough RAM, which will also be faster.

I'll go as far as to suggest not to waste CD/DVD and use Slax on a USB flash drive instead - it'll boot faster and will work from RAM without any slowdowns further on. It won't require you to erase all data on that FD or kill that FAT, also allowing you to store all system modifications so there's no need to change cfgs on each boot or prepare them all before burning a CD.
Another plus is that you can bundle all your favorite (and most impressive) software with it as modules (just look for modules section on slax site), there's a 'Kill Bill' edition for those who aren't quite comfortable with native soft and... hell, it's based on slackware!)

Why not trying SLAX


greetings,
eddyvp

2 1/2 to 3 years ago I set up friend with dual boot Win XP cnd CentOS Linux 4.0

Win XP is not hooked to the internet. They boot CentOS for internet useage. There is a shared vfat partition, shared between the two OS.

They are not very computer literate.

But the GUI internet apps (and openoffice.org) firefox and I forget which email app, not the big and popular gnome one because I never learned it myself, were EZ enuff for them to use. (Gnome desktop) *probably* close enuff to them like Win 98 desktop that they could use alright.

P.S. Debian 4 r1 h as gnome desktop much akin to CentOS (IOW, today, I might use Debian for them)


KDE desktop might be fine for them but I'd likely set it to double click instead of the default single click. (they're at times clumsy with the mouse and sometimes fail to realize that they clicked on something and set it off/launched).

--
Alan.

If you're going for Ubuntu make sure it's recent and has the stuff in for media playback (mp3, etc.).