Just Installed SuSE 6.2 it was easier to setup than windows.
I thought modems, scanners and burners were going to be tricky to setup. I was so pleased ,delighted even that everything got detected , -connected and worked straight away. Also Star Office is extremely good. I use it to work on all those MS Office 2000 docs I get sent.

I have two main questions: one silly.

1. Can an op/sys like Linux make use of a motherboard with multiple processors? I notice that destop PC's only come with one CPU. Is this because that is all windoze can make use off or is there a deeper reason? I know servers come with two CPU's I think? Is that because each processor is working on completely different tasks in a server. I ask because I would like to get a PC with two cpu's for using with Linux only if it gives significant advantage. I want to do graphics intensive work.

2. Is there a cheap or free graphics program like 3D MAX or Milkshape for Linux and are there Quake 2 and 3 game engine editors ported to Linux ? Can Gimp be used for skins., 3d models ?

3. This question is silly, but* is there a better distro of Linux than SuSE ? If so can you give a reason why it is better 4 'you' ?[SIZE=3]COLOR=darkblue]2. Is there a cheap or free graphics program like 3D MAX [/COLOR]

What was your primary reason for wanting to get into Linux ?

I have tried Slackware, Gentoo, and Red Hat and of all of them I can use Red Hat the most. I works the best on servers but it makes a great worstation as well, but for servers go with Red Hat

You can run linux on multple processors, yes. Though I don't know much about multi-processor OS issues or the linux implementations that would make use of them. With windows you have to run applications written for multiple CPUs or the extra won't be used, but I'm not sure if this applies to linux.

Desktops usually have one CPU because most people don't need more than that. It's also much more complicated engineering-wise to produce multiprocessor motherboards, and so they're much more expensive. Not hard to get a dual-processor motherboard if you want to spend the money, though.

If you're going to get a multiprocessor setup, it avoids problems to get both CPUs from the same batch, i.e. with the same "stepping number".

'til now, server can go really farther than 2 processor, as example, Alpha Servers can have up to 86 processor, each data bus has his own processor I think. Of course this server is not supported by Windoze (except if you pay $300 000 to Microsoft to get a special WinXP server edition... sight... ) but Linux does.

Depent of what are your need, what you want to do and what is your computer. I think Suse is a good choice for graphic but I never tried it.

As you can see, I closed your poll, we already have enough, "which distro do you use type polls and threads." Also if you browse this forum and the distro, we have long threads already on why we choose to run Linux.

norfarm, what does throught mean? how can you misspell in your signature??

ok

there's a program called blender that recently got open-sourced by the company that developed it - it was free to download even before that tho. i've only used 3dmax sparingly, but blender has some of the same functions. gimp is a great graphics package - very photoshopish. i honestly don't know if it does 3d. (anyone ?)

linux scales pretty well with multi-processers - the standard kernel doesn't have problems with smp until you get to 4+ processors - which is rare, but i've read some articles where geeks scaled linux up to 1000+ just for the heck of it. it's still a running myth that linux doesn't scale too well on smp - smp support on linux is pretty darn good - but it's not great yet. the next major kernel release is supposed to enhance that considerably.

there is a quake engine available somewhere - i know i've seen quake running on linux boxes . you may want to check out sites like sourceforge and freshmeat for programs and source.

also- distro wars and debates aren't my thing (they're all the same underneath the install progs) , but suse 6.2 is pretty old. there's definitely a more recent release out there.

http://www.qeradiant.com/?data=files

and ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff