Hello From a newbie to Linux:

Convince me, with facts not just; “because it’s the best”, I want to know the following “facts” about Linux OS before I do anything.

1. How easy is it to change from XP-Pro, or Back?
2. Can my MS applications work on Linux. (Ex Word. Office).
3. Will IE and Outlook work.
4. Internet access will it change?
5. I currently have a P-3, 1.00 GHz, 512 Ram, 2-20 gig HD’s, NFTS, running XP-Pro, It’s setup as a duel 2 person “users” system with different options for each. All programs on one drive everything else on the other.
6. Experiences from people who have changed and/or back.

My wife says I research things to death; she on the other hand does things on the spur of the moment. I have had to re-install my Os 21 times because of her downloads.
I hope this is the correct forum. I’ll check back tomorrow, have to go to work.

Any help to links, articles would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance…. Time Wizard

try searching google or this forum first

1. depends
2. yes, with a program called wine, supports office xp and others
3. use mozilla and some linux email client, but yes, with wine
4. ??
5. is that a question
6. haha, i could go on and on and on...

EDIT:

yay!!! this is my 30th post, so i am no longer called a newbie...next goal...1000 posts. (in case anyone is interested)

1) depends what you install, if you go for knoppix then its as simple as rebooting and ejecting the cd

2) it is possible that they may work under wine(at attempt to provide windows syscalls on linux) but i doubt it as microsoft are well known for using secret api calls in there code so its faster than everyone elses. there are however similar application that are capable of exactly the same open office for example which even has the ability to open/save in the word/excel/etc file format. i personally cant tell the difference but then i dont see the difference between word 2 and word 2000 apart from the paperclip.

3) same answer as 2 but again there are applications out there that do the same thing.

4) depends how you get online, i would need to know if you are dsl, ethernet, modem, etc

5) this doesnt appear to be a question, i dont see any problem with your specs, one of the biggest problems at the moment imho is 3d acceleration if your not interested in games then most hard ware works absolutly fine. if you were to install i would probably shrink the partition all the programs were on by a few gig and install on the end of that but i dont know how easy/hard that is as ive never done it.

6) i personaly believe in the right tool for the right job. a lot of the stuff i do is either latex or fortran/C programming and all the stuff i need for that comes free with linux and costs a LOT of money in windows which was why i changed. if your thinking of changing just because people say you should or because of stability then dont bother xp's just as stable as linux is and it has better hardware support. but if you want a general understanding of how your computer works or are just ready for something new and are prepared to commit time/effort/reading(lots of this) to it. then by all means go for it.

If you're not convinced you want to try it, then don't. It's not up to others to make that decision for you. If others do and something goes wrong, you'll just end up blaming them. Read up on it if you are curious.

1) Not sure what you mean. If you mean dual-booting, it is very easy. Most installers will ask you if you have any other OSes you want to boot to and set it up for you. Just make sure you have a partition (or hard drive) to devote to Linux.

2) Maybe, as others have said, but why run Linux just to remain with Microsoft junk? Many of the "desktop" distros come with a program called OpenOffice (see www.openoffice.org) which is a full-featured office suite and is FREE.

3) IE and Outlook? Use mozilla, a far better browser (built in pop up killer!) and Ximian Evolution, which is very similar to Outlook. Again, most desktop distros come with these built in.

4) Need more info. I'm on DSL and it was actually easier to get my net access going on linux than it was on Windows.

5) ??? Not sure what you are asking. You can set your Linux system up in a very similar way, with as many users as you need, and as many hard drive partitions as you want. In fact, the installer for most major distros will set it up easily to your liking.

6) I switched and like Linux very much. I haven't turned my computer off for days. Could never say that with Windows (and I have used 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE, 2000, ME, and XP). All the programs I need are readily available, usually for free. The only thing I've ever had to pay for was WineX, which you won't need unless you want to play games, and that was only $15.

However, I think you may need to re-evaluate your expectations. You seem to want to be able to run your Windows apps on Linux. No. That isn't what you do. Linux has its own apps. If you are too stuck on IE, then you won't like Linux. This is a new operating system, and there are different ways to do things.

-dave

Thanks people,

I'll check up on all the suggestions.

By the way, do you think I will keep having to reinstall the OS if I change or should I just buy the wife her own pc to kill.

Thanks, Time Wizard........

you may do a few different installs until you settle on a distribution but once youve found one you like theres no reason to reinstall

Well, one of the very nice things about Linux is that unless you are accessing the system as the root user, or the superuser, you can't do a lot of harm to the system. And, you should never log in as superuser or root unless you HAVE to. So, just give your wife her own account and there probably isn't much she can do.

In addition, in most cases, software is not as simple to install in Linux (at first, anyway) so you may find that she isn't installing as much junk on your system.

If you really want to give it a go, I would suggest downloading Knoppix. It is a bootable CD, and you can use it to run Linux without making any changes to your hard drive at all. If you like it, then you can try another distro (or install Knoppix on the hard drive). Just keep in mind that the speed at which Knoppix runs will be slower as it runs off of the CD and is limited by the speed of your CD drive.

-dave

Would you please elaborate about this? I will be connecting with dialup using a Rockwell HCF 56K modem (on an old Compaq Presario). Are you saying it might not work??

It's a case of getting the right software for your modem then configuring it correctly - a good starting point for information about Winmodems and Linux is:

http://www.linmodems.org/

More specifically - this site might be of some use

http://www.linuxant.com/drivers/

(Rockwell is now Conexant)

i have switched from being a dependent WinXP user to a Slackware Linux user (slack is a distro requring you to do pretty much everything manually)

linux in my opinion is far more stable and a more "fun" environment in which to play around with your pc; if you're ready for something new and want to leave windoze because of frustration, then give linux a try

but you might want to re-evaluate your reasons for moving: most of us here will bash windoze and m$ like there is no tomorrow, but if you find that it is working for u, don't add frustration on top of what you may already have for windows

i agree, by the looks of your original post, you want to be able to rerun windoze programs (specifically those made by m$ on a linux machine) which is not a good idea, but there are definitely free open source equivalents that allow the reading and writing of ms office documents and such (and the situation is getting better all the time, developers and beginning to program a lot more for linux and in fact many things are programmed within linux but always optimized for windows)

In conclusion, if you feel that windoze is not working for you, give linux a try (probably Mandrake or Redhat); if u feel perfectly ok with windoze, stick with it unless you want a new experience that will teach you the world of computers and introduce you to programming languages and such (keep in mind that using linux enough will cause you to speak in terms that no one will understand ) You must be ready to devote probably a good amount of time in the beginning to get used to linux
p.s. don't worry about forgetting windoze, i found that getting better at linux made me a better windoze user as i found using command prompt a lot easier than using the actual gui; dual-booting makes this very easy

May I recommend knoppix. Just burn it to a cd like you would for any other distro and pop it in your cdrom and it runs entirely off the cdrom. No commitment so you can see if you like linux.