As Total-MAdMan said, spaces in file / folder names is only an issue when using the command line (but there are ways around it). If you are using your distro's GUI file browser you will not have a problem.

As for upper/lowercase names, Linux doesn't have a problem as such...
Some users have a problem (again from the command line) because Linux is case sensitive.

If you try to change directory to a folder called Documents.

This would work:
This would not work:
The wonderful thing about Linux is choice. There is a wide selection of applications for almost any task, if kate is the best text editor for you then use it.

I know that vi/vim can be scary, however, I would suggest taking the time to learn at least the basics of vi/vim. It is the one editor you can pretty much guarantee will be available on any UNIX or Linux system.

The following site provides a pretty good overview of vim:
http://larc.ee.nthu.edu.tw/~cthuang/...vim-intro.html

I personally almost always use vi. That doesn't mean it's the best editor, just the best editor for me

I suggest that you try a number of text editors and stick with the one's you feel most comfortable with.

For simple stuff: GEDIT, Kate, pico, JOE
For web design: Bluefish, Quanta+
For modifiying .DOC files: OpenOffice Writer (Part of the OpenOffice.org suite)

Hello.

Thanks to you, Total-MadMaN and Disilluonist. I think that I can work with those partition sizes, and it’s good to hear that they make sense to you as well.

I guess I was confused with the 'mixed case and spaces in file and folder names' issue. I thought it would always be a problem, but am relieved to hear that it’s not in the GUI. And thank you for the tips on enclosing any potentially problematic filename in quotes – I had not read that before, and it is the “quick fix” I was hoping/looking for. Whew. I’ll also make sure to type with an eye on case when I’m going after a specifically named directory.

I had looked briefly at Quanta and Bluefish and they both look like they’ll serve my purposes just fine. I have been using Aptana and Komodo Edit and HTML-Kit until now. Apparently Aptana and Komodo both do have Linux versions (just not HTML-Kit), but I’ll be eager to try Quanta and Bluefish (especially since they’re more likely to already be in the repositories).

That’s a nice quick summary of vi/vim in that link, Disillusionist, and easier to digest off the bat than some other literature I’ve seen. So thank you.

I’ve already been trying to use (for the past several months) apps that I know I’ll be switching to that I can try ahead of time in Windows: OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Gimp, Inkscape, FileZilla, even Scribus, etc. So hopefully I won’t be too adrift here in the beginning.

I’ve probably made too much of all this over the past week or two, newbie that I am... but I want this to go as smoothly as possible so I can keep working, and, because there will be no turning back.

Adios, Redmond; hello, World.

Thank you all.


Tony Awards

Depending on which SuSE version you are looking at, it is easy to install the wireless drivers. A cutter program installs a script that will download the driver for you, cut out the firmware and save it where it needs to go. You just need to run the script as root, and have a wired network connection working. ( The package may be called bcm43xx-cutter, but I'm not certain. Different kernel versions use a differently named kernel driver for broadcom devices and the part before the -cutter will match the kernel's broadcom driver ). Search in the package manager for bc or bc43 or bcm43xx.
In SuSE 10.3, the script was "/usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware"

The one tricky part I've had installing SuSE is with video. I need to install the nvidia driver on my desktop before I can set the resolution properly in sax2.

Thank you, jschiwal, I will look for that. I still have not completely decided which distro to start with, but I do like the size of the SuSE community, and the size of the repositories (currently I believe that Sabayon, for example, has fewer packages to choose from than open SuSE), so perhaps it is a good one to get going with. Sabayon simply found everything from the beginning, including my current Windows partition files and other public folders inside other boxes on our network, so that was appealing. I have not had that kind of out-of-the-box success with other distros' live CD/DVDs so far.

But then all I have played with is open SuSE's live CD - I expect their full-on installation DVD has 'most everything I would need as well, just as the Sabayon live DVD does, no?

Thanks for the tips for wireless cards and video; I haven't made it to checking out the video in my testing, but I will be getting there shortly.