my friends recommended me to suse. and im thinking of giving linux another try. i've tried mandrake and fedora, and gave up after many fustrations.

one of the things i've just realised is my school assignments, they need to be done in visual basic. i'd like to use as little windows as possible, if i am to learn anything.

i remember there was some windows emulators around. i remember trying - and failing, to set up one of them. it definately was not vmware. is vmware any good? to my knowledge it's an emulator of some sort.

that's my main concern. if i could i'd be happy to run a few games on it.

any information would help, thanks

-Nay

Suse is decent, and I prefer KDE over Gnome.

The emulator you're probably thinking about is WINE. They've emulated many windows API calls and the environment, and it works pretty well. You can use it with or without existing windows .DLL files (like if you have a dual boot environment).

You'll probably want to get NTFS support so you can dual boot and let WINE use your real windows directory. I would think that VB support is easy or basic enough to work well, but it will take a while (and a bit of googling) to find out for sure.

Another way to run windows apps on linux (I can't say emulator because Wine Is Not an Emulator) is Crossover - and there's even a DirectX port called... something.. Transgaming... but you lose a lot of speed...

I tried going Suse for my desktop for a while but in the end there were one or two apps on XP that I couldn't live with out and didn't emulate very well (Newsleecher for one).

If you get frustrated easily, just wait for "Vista" to come out

Well, VB6 is dead as far as Microsoft is concerned.

If you want a VB clone that runs on Linux, try Gambas.

i would do gambas if visual basic was not a unnegotiable requirement on my assignments (need to be submitted on a cd, with the exe and all vb source files)

i'm downloading suse now, 5 gb, 28 hours till finished.

i've used vista since i have an msdn subscription and it's really buggy as far as im concerned - even for beta. u cant go to file -> open, without crashing. i have 1 gb of ram, amd64bit3000+ and gfx6600, sata hdd. and it lags when openining folders. even my friend's computer does. so we turned off page file and it was fast as normal xp - then it wouldnt boot after the next restart, i had to put xp back on.

ah well, let's hope ms does a better job when releasing the next beta.

-Nay