Got what I'm calling a WinCam (Nikon L3) that'll dump 100meg of pix into Win98 with no problem but stalls at about 5-10meg of pix with my Linspire system and seems to take the rest of the day off. Is there a work around, add-on that'll solve that problem?

How are you uploading your pics? You can mount the device (if it doesn't already auto-mount) and open the file manager. Copy the files from the camera directory into your pictures directory.

A link to info. about the camera would help. It would answer silly Q's like "How does it connect to the computer?"

Also, do you have any other distro available to test this on -- i.e. is this a Linspire problem or a Nikon problem?

I plug the camera into the computer using the cord from Nikon (usb). A icon comes up on my desktop saying something about nikon. Peeking around I find /mnt/sda1 and in there the files/pix that I can list in my file manager. There is a 125mg of pix in the camera and get little icons for all of em in the file manager. Select all and move or copy to another file and the whole thing stalls after about a half a dozen pix download. Those that do DL are good and I can bring em up with any pix program I have. I have used the file manager program and also the terminal (dos kinda thing) to try and dump the camera stuff into a file I can use but always the same thing, a few pix download and then stall. After several minutes of waiting I get a message can not stat filename after the terminal downloads one or two pix at most. My suspicion is I don't have enough memory in the system to do the whole job at one time. Have tried to DL just a few meg at a time but of course that would take forever and is just a pain in the ass and after DLing a couple of files the Nikon icon disappears from the desktop, guess that means it's unmounted.

How much RAM do you have?

Maybe a looping script?

Please try to use paragraphs, your run together sentences all in 1 para. are very hard to read.

Appreciate ya'll help with this problem but going to have to go back to my win98, much easier to use. Do enjoy this Linux stuff and will keep playing with it but for practical work win is a much better system.

What you perceive as "win98, much easier to use" is more likely the difficulty of learning new, & in our opinion much easier, ways of doing things. Most of us who know Linux believe that it is much easier & would not voluntarily go back. (I don't consider bribery w/ a large salary truly voluntary. )

Consider Vista: I have heard IT professionals say that it is easier to use than XP & W2k, yet one of the complaints from regular users is that it is more difficult. Why the contradiction? To be substantially easier the new thing has to be different; if it weren't, it couldn't be easier. Therefore, Different is always initially Difficult. No "easy" way around it.

I sure you know that W98 is no longer supported -- there are no more bug patches being written. You may or may not believe that its technology was never intended for networking & can never be secure in an Internet environment. Even Bill Gates knows that -- that's why W2k, XP, & Vista are all built on "NT Technology".

If you want to keep using your current hardware w/o disconnecting from the 'Net, you would be well advised to test, pick, & install a lightweight version of Linux. There are many available as Live CD's that you could try out. The most important aspect of being "lightweight" is the choice of Desktop Environment (DE) or Window Manger (WM). Because Knoppix offers several lightweight WM's in addition to its default KDE, it is an ideal place to start a search. My personal preferences are fluxbox & IceWM. There are many, probably confusingly many, others.

I used a lot of open source programs on Win98SE, such as those found on
the open disc. I continued on Windows until XP shut down my system for swapping some hardware.

Being familiar with OSS, I headed for linux. Believe me, I felt like you did and wanted to run back to Windows...especially when I managed to make it crash my computer & delete my files. [I like to play.]

Linux has a learning curve, but it is not beyond the reach of the average [Windows] user. So, definitely keep it up.

As suggested, if your current distro isn't working well, do try the live CD's. I personally like Mandriva. But, many folks enjoy Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS. I thought Debian Live had a nice live CD with Xfce. (KDE tends to be heavy no matter the distro.)

A good distro has all the basic software installed already, so no major tweaking should be necessary.