Man, do I love Linux! I installed my first distro (VectorLinux 5.8 Std Gold) on a backup PC about 1 1/2 weeks ago, and I am totally hooked! I've since decided to setup dual boot on my main PC (wanna hang onto XP for a bit longer), and I've narrowed my decision as to what distro to put on THIS machine down to 2 candidates... Mandriva 2008 or openSUSE 10.3. I helped a friend install openSUSE last night on his PC, and so far he's pretty impressed with the GUI. He hasn't had much of a chance to check out some of the other aspects of the distro, and unfortunately the CD I have is NOT a Live CD. Right now I am running off the Mandriva Live CD, and I am LUVING IT!!! I am seriously considering using this distro, but I had a very important question... How well does openSUSE access Windoze files? Mandriva had NO PROBLEM whatsoever playing my music and viewing pics that are on my HD (all in XP). I REALLY wish I could find an openSUSE Live CD that I could play with and give it a taste-test. Anyone know of a download link for one?

Accesses files as well as any other distro I guess

http://ftp.iasi.roedu.net/mirrors/op....3-RC2/iso/cd/

Actually, this website hosts downloads that include a SuSE 10.2 live DVD. You can find it here: http://iso.linuxquestions.org/suse/o...-dvd/#live-dvd

If you don't have a DVD-ROM, you might have to use an older version. Hope this fills the bill for you.

-Alan

BTW: I'm writing this on an Acer Aspire 3002LCi dual-booted with XP and openSuSE 10.0, and have no trouble accessing the files on the XP partitions. Of course, I virtually never boot XP.

Although I have limited experience with 10.3 (it is a new release at the time of this writing), all recent SUSE distributions have accessed files on a Windows partition of the same machine without issue. Of course, you cannot save (write) files to an NTFS partition, but everything else works fine.