Hello everyone!!

I work in an IT dept. at a local company, and in my off time, I double as a musician who likes to record his music directly into his computer.

Up to now I have always lived in the Windows world in my home environment. Lately I have been going through some Linux training, and am feeling lured to look into the possibility of running Linux in my home setup. Right now I have basically three pc's networked in my home, all running xp... my desktop, my wife's laptop, and my grandfather's desktop. All three machines are fine machines, upwards of 3 ghz, with decent ram. My thought would be to switch my computer to Linux, and my concerns are several fold:

1)I know I would be able to remain networked with the other pc's, but would it function easily, and seamlessly, or are there potential problems?

2)I like to run windows apps like games, and some audio editing software on my pc, and have been investigating the wine, or win4lin software for linux, to keep these apps happening. How well do they work though?? I have read different reviews.

3)If anyone wanted to run through some advantage/disadvantage points, I would really appreciate any imput you had to lend me.

Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge with me. Your time and expertise is greatly appreciated.

I'd strongly recommend that you do NOT simply "switch" from Windows to Linux, but rather dual boot at first. This means that your computer has both Windows and Linux installed, and you can choose which operating system to boot up into whenever the computer is restarted.

It is frustrating to try and switch entirely all at once, because there are always things you don't know how to do or can't figure out.

If you're completely new to Linux, I'd recommend you start off with a LiveCD like Knoppix or Mepis. This is an OS which runs directly from the CD without installing onto a hard drive (you don't even need a hard drive at all). You can thus get a bit familiar with Linux without even installing anything. Knoppix-based LiveCDs like Mepis also can be installed onto the hard drive.

Hi I'm using linux for recording. I wouldn't recommend running windows music tools under wine. When I used Windows I was using Rebirth, frutyloops, Cakewalk, ntrack and soundforge. My linux setup is so much better. there are plenty of available audio tools, most of them free. I've found the tools to replace everything I needed windows for and some stuff I never could've done on my budget in windows. You might want to check out demudi it is a debian based distro geared towards audio work.

I appreciate the information. Thanks. I think I will get my hands on one of those live cd's and check it out. It will be interesting to get into some of the music editing programs Linux has to offer.

It will be a learning curve, but depending on what you want to network it is rather easy going Linux to Linux.
as mentioned running high performance apps via wine or even win4lin is not a very good way to go. there are plenty of FOSS apps out there to replace anything in windows for audio.

well simple. Linux is Linux and except for games it is multiples times better then windows. this coming from a guy who only made the switch to Linux about 2 years back and still learning how to do a lot of things in Linux like i can in windows.

but to give you some encouragement my 3yr can use Linux with no problems. heck he can even manage the dual boot on their box. it dual boots XP for games like JumpStart and Linux for everything else.

play with several of the LiveCDs, build a cheap older computer to practice getting used to managing and networking Linux with windows, then take time to learn more, use this great site, and join your local LUG (linux user group) and grow from there.

I tried to a version of knoppix, that said it was English, but unfortunately it loaded in German.. Is there a way to get it to boot in English, or do I need to obtain a different copy. Thanks!