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Hey folks !
I am a windows power user planning to switch to linux and my requirements in an operating system is that it should be 64 bit and it should be capable of handling 32 gig or ram and should work on a xeon processor and should be compatible with nvidia quadro fx graphics card and should have support for propritary multimedia formats and should be capable of dual-booting with win vista and should have support for nearly any peice of hardware and should be capable of handling any type of workststion activity and plus it should be a commercial distro my friends recommended that i try RHEL Desktop With Workstation and Multi-OS
So it would be very nice if you folks could make a recommendation as to which OS i should go for
Yours
Maddieboy

Go with Red Hat Enterprise 5.2 or the free version CentOS 5.2
that will never happen until the manufactures stop making MS Windows ONLY stuff.

But does CentOS have commercial 24/7 tech support and and if so then for how long from the release date is each stable release supported and where can i get CentOS and by the way if i can download it then are there any mirrors near india
Yours,
Maddieboy

You're kinda asking for a lot.

I think you (the OP) really need to learn how to use punctuation.

@Maddieboy: The thing to remember is that Linux requires a different approach to doing some things. It's not that you need to sacrifice anything necessarily but rather you might want to prioritize your OS needs; is the hardware support more important than the proprietary multimedia support? Is the commercial aspect more important than ease-of-use?

Technically, everything you're asking for is available in almost every mainstream Linux distro; it depends on what you're willing to put into it. I never got the proprietary-multimedia thing; what difference does it make if you have to download it and install it after the OS is installed? Windows requires this anyway. Any mainstream Linux distro can handle "any type of workstation activity", but *you* have to decide which apps will be used and how it will be set up. Any mainstream Linux distro will support Nvidia Quadro cards but *you* may have to install the driver.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is, Linux is for the most part a do-it-yourself OS. You can pay for commercial support, but you can do that with Windows. You said yourself that you wanted to dual-boot Vista. I would never actively try to dissuade anyone from trying Linux but if you want your OS to behave like Windows, with all the "built-in features" of Windows, with commercial support (which Windows has), with nearly universal hardware support (again, like Windows), then the question becomes: Why is it that you're switching in the first place? If you just want to try it out there are plenty of LiveCDs out there to take for a spin. VMware Server and VirtualBox are free virtual machine apps that allow you to try out as many Linux distros as you like, and that's often a necessary thing because as I (and I'm sure many other people here) have seen, there are about as many ways to run Linux as there are people who run it.
Don't let me (or anyone else) discourage broadening your horizons, but you need to know where you want to go before you can ask how to get there-

if it must be commericial (ie paied for)
then i would recomend RHEL or SLED/SLES www.suse.com

Most distros have a 64 bits version nowadays.

That's nothing to do with linux, but with nvidia. Check the nvidia site to see the supported models:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_18897.html

There's nothing that linux can do about that, though nvidia are usually fast and good at supporting their hardware on linux. Much better than ati. Since the driver is always the same, ALL the distros support the same range of nvidia cards.

Any distro, just install the right codecs.

Any distro. They all use grub or lilo as boot loaders. Nothing to do with linux either. The boot loader runs outside of the OS.

You really need to change your mind. If you wanna use MacOS X, you buy hardware suited for MacOS X. If you want to play Playstation games, you buy a Playstation. In a similar way, If you want to run linux, you buy hardware suited for linux, and avoid yourself problems in the future.

Linux does support a wide range of hardware devices, but again: all the distros are the same, since the drivers are included in the kernel, and all the distros use the same kernel (maybe with some distro specific patches, but basically, it's all the same). The only thing you can do to get better hardware support is to keep your kernel up to date.

Most generalist distros will comply with that. As long as you don't use a server oriented distro, or some other kind of distro suited for an specific task (e.g. rescue distros and such).

RHEL is as good option as any other. Look in distrowatch.com and see what's available. It has a very good search engine that can search distros depending on your criteria. A good place to start. Then download some livecds and see for yourself. No one can tell you what's the ideal choice for you.

Hi,

You should read the 'Linux is Not Windows'. A great article for a M$ Windows user that is thinking of making a change. A Linux newbie would be another great candidate to read this article.

This link and others are available from 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!

Wow, I went to all the trouble of trying to articulate those very same ideas, and someone already made a page of it...





...I think I'll have to print that page out or at least link to it from my site...

Say .... Is there any software that i can use to wirelessly and remotely syncronize the calendar& contacts on my BlackBerry Bold 9000 with the calendar& address book on evolution ?

i don't use a blackbarry ,but most/all modern *nix's support bluetooth very well .