I've had problems with Wine and WineX using Redhat, is there an easy alternative for a friend just starting out? He wants to run Windows programs and games but knows nothing about Linux so I want the transition to be as smoothe as possible.

Thanks.

Well, basically all distros when broken down are the same, just come with different packages and such.

You could go with Mandrake which is very newbie friendly but I really see the point if your going to be running Linux but wanting to run Windows applications. Maybe you should show your friend alternatives which run better and with less hassle with Linux, instead of using Wine or WineX to run Windows apps on it?

When I personally want to run Windows apps, I just use Windows for that matter...

Another option is to dual boot Windows and a Linux distribution - you'd then get the best from both and be able to share data between them - just an idea

Anyway - if you want to check out the various Linux distributions - try Distrowatch

Click here to go to Distrowatch

Mandrake is very WineX friendly (even had a version of 8.1 out with the Transgaming stuff added + The SIMs). However it tends to be a little less feature rich than say, SuSE. SuSE is a good distro but is not really designed to be WineX friendly out of box. It will work, but you might need a little more tweaking to get things 100%. It may be a good idea to download Transgamings GUI setup tool as well if you are using SuSE. Manual WineX installs in SuSE tend to be a little problematic (the terminals don't like executing Windoze program installs graphically from the command line... as much as with other distros).

RedHat's distro has a fix if you are running WineX. I'd advise looking into a copy of the review in the latest Linux Journal magazine (the Hulk on the cover, which, of course, the movie was rendered with a farm of Linux machines). There is one package that poops on the workings of WineX, that if disabled in start-up makes everything honky-dory and isn't sorely missed...