Hi Everyone,

I'm sure this is a message that gets asked often hopefully I'll make myself as clear as possible, and I might be a bit long winded so bear with me please. First off let me tell you that I'm a person with fairly reasonable tech skills, and have some experience with Linux (I run a RH 7.2 personal web / mail server) and have been thinking of changing my desktop PC over to being a Linux desktop and saying goodbye to Microsoft. Not because I think bad of them, I'm currently running windows XP and it runs great however I'm just thinking I'd like to do a change. A couple of statistics of the machine I'm running first:

AMD K6-2 550 (I know its old)
256 MB PC-133 (running at PC100 thou)
Aopen AX59 Pro Drive (Via Chipset)
30 gig IDE Drive
Geforce 2 MX 400
USB keyboard and Mouse (MS Intellimouse Optical / IBM Multimedia Keyboard)
USB Logitech Webcam
Plexter 12/10/32 IDE Burner
CDROM 32x IDE
Vortex 2 Sound Card
3com Network Card.

What my question is to you folks is as follows: What would be your recommendations for Distro and Software to do some of the specific tasks that I'll mention in a moment. I also want to be able to keep the system fairly clean (I don't need 6 different email clients, or 5 browsers, or 3 different programs for chat) and only keep on what I actually want. Below is what I do in Windows XP and the software I use:

Email: Eudora Pro
Web: Mozilla
PC Banking: Internet Explorer (bank doesn't support moz)
IRC Chat: mIRC
IM Chat: Trillian 1.0 Pro (because I use all the major networks)
Music: QCD Player (I don't like winamp)
NNTP: Grabit (I don't really read articles I download music and stuff)
DL Music: Kazaa Lite
Gaming: Counter-Strike and Yahoo! Games
HTML / PHP: Dreamweaver Ultra Dev 4
Images: Photoshop
Video Chat: MS Netmeeting
Office Suite: MS Office XP
CD Burner: Nero or Clone CD

The most important to me out of those and the ones I think will be hardest to duplicate is Counter-Strike (i'd like similar performance to what i have under winXP), Trillian (again similar performance or features), and Netmeeting (as long as it works with mic and camera i'm happy). I'm also thinking some of my hardware is going to cause me problems, like my vortex soundcard and my usb webcam. Can anyone offer me some suggestions and help me feel better about doing a Linux switch??? My first though is to use RH NULL when it gets released but I'm open to anything.


Thx!!

well firstly you really should be making you own efforts, like seraching the net, for information about what suits you best... Escpecially for which distro, the question is asked far too many times by people unwilling to do their own research... just click the serch button on this site and look there...

Generally the package you should use for everything is the one you prefer not the one recommended to you, although of course that has some weight... but a few specifics...

Internet Explorer. No, not ever. million billion years. If you see *any* suggestions of ways to make it work, ignore them. not possible / practical / realistic. there is no alternative, just move banks.

trillian ---> GAIM... although no one EVER believes that it supports everything, but it does, trust me.

PHP - no clone available: you're clever enough to write it properly aren't you?

kazaa - not available on linux anymore, use gnutella e.g gtk-gnutella

office suite. nothing compares to office. nothing.

photoshop - gimp

netmeeting... nothing really AFAIK

everything else has many many many clones, all of which are perfectly adequate. just use your own initiative to find what suits you best, that's one of the things that linux stands for. And don't be impressed by windows clones. if you want to move to linux, do it because you want linux, not want a free version of windows.

use opera as your browser because you can set it to tell sites it's ie 5+ (our bank site said blah with moz. use ie5 we used opera no prob.)
xmms for music
xchat for irc
star office for wordprocessing - handles .doc files

Also for gaming Check out www.transgaming.com, they make a program called winex which alows you to run most windows games for example

Counter Strike, Starcraft, Grand Theft Auto, Diabllo II w/ expansion and more.

check their site they got a whole list of games that you can run on linux.

You can also get on ebay and look for some Loki games. Loki ported games from windows to linux and for the most part they did good. I have Heavy gear 2, Soldier of Fortune, Heroes of might and magic3.

Some companys are now releaseing games for linux Quake 3 is availabel for linux as well as unreal.

Burning is easy with gtoaster its a GUI front end for the command line cdrecord.

I would suggest that if you have 30 gigs, you might want to dual boot for a while... then shoot MS to shit later. It's going to take some major investigation to get your system to work just how you want it... but that's where the fun is.

Good Luck