Well I have given a linux another go, after becoming frustrated with it awhile back. Using Red Hat 9 right now, but have Mandrake 9.2 on cd to decide which I like better.

Anyways still some things holding me back from not using Linux most of the time.

Inability to check hotmail through evolution. Wish there was a hotmail popper for linux, in rpm format.

Not being able to access local ntfs drives, kind of a pain not to be able to get to my MS drives for documents, pics, etc.

Not being able to see Serial ATA drives, have a 80GB sata drive where XP resides on that I would love to be able to configure with lilo, so I can choose which to boot at startup.

No MSN Messenger, tried one cakkled koppe(or something like that) but gives an error about not being able to connect. Is there something similiar to trillian with a nice user interface? Most of the linux programs tend to look pretty awfull in my opinion.

Games, of course this is not a big deal can always jump into windows fo this.

Other than these little issues, Linux is a great OS. Hopefully a company with enough money will one day develop a flavor, give it the hardware support it needs, driver support, and software support to make it competive for the usual computer user, the ones that can't compile source code, make programs, and just want it to work

On a side not I have been looking at some programs and they say stuff like untrar this then run install.sh to make this. How the heck do you go about doing this? Is thier some command interface that you need to bring up?

Actually, if you ditch Windows, many of the issues you mention won't be relevant anymore.

As to your last question, just open a terminal window, where you can type tar zxvf <filename> to untar things (which are also GZipped, omit the z if they aren't), or run installation scripts, etc.

Steve

Do a search on this forum for hotmail - within the last week a link to a program called Hotwayd (I think) was posted.

The ability to read ntfs is not in the kernel by default - once again, search this forum as this question has been asked a number of times. You will be able to read from but not write to ntfs.

As far a MSN Messenger goes, there are a number of programs available (AMSN comes to mind) search the forum.

Games - get hold of WineX, this allows games to be played in Linux. Equally, some games have either been ported to Linux or the developers have written files to allow them to run.

Dunno about SATA - try a search or maybe someone will post about it.

So really, you have no reason now not to stick with Linux!

You can read NTFS drives, at least in Mandrake 9.1 - just can't write to them (yet).

I untar things by right-clicking on them and saying "Extract here". Just like unzipping a file in Windows.

for your last point, open a command shell. Under kde, try konsole. us 'cd' and a dir name to switch over to that directory. when you get to the directory with install.sh, type ./install.sh the . means current directory

Inability to check hotmail through evolution. Wish there was a hotmail popper for linux, in rpm format.

That happens because hotmail works only with Outlook Express. As far as I remember, not even Outlook (which is also MS, shipped with Office) can handle hotmail protocols. You could either create an account at www.linuxmail.org (to use with Evolution, it's not free) or even better, www.myrealbox.com. Pop3 and smtp freely for ya and avoid those kids who loves to spam at hotmail and yahoo accounts

Not being able to access local ntfs drives, kind of a pain not to be able to get to my MS drives for documents, pics, etc

You can access it, but you won't be able to write to a ntfs partition. Perhaps newer kernels can handle it, but it's kinda dangerous. To access your ntfs partition, go into /etc/fstab and add the line:

That would let your windows c partition (assuming it's located at hda1) available for reading only at /mnt/win_c.

Not being able to see Serial ATA drives, have a 80GB sata drive where XP resides on that I would love to be able to configure with lilo, so I can choose which to boot at startup.

No idea about this, sorry

No MSN Messenger, tried one cakkled koppe(or something like that) but gives an error about not being able to connect. Is there something similiar to trillian with a nice user interface? Most of the linux programs tend to look pretty awful in my opinion.

Use gaim or amsn. Gaim is shipped with your Redhat and Mandrake CD's and can handle both MSN and ICQ protocols at the same time, amoung others (jabber, irc, aim...)

Games, of course this is not a big deal can always jump into windows fo this.

Check after wine and winex. Winex is a pretty good program which allows you to play based DirectX games under Linux while wine is more used for running ordinaries win16/32/nt programs (some games might work too though). Indeed, it's not 100% compatible, but I really am glad with the speed and usage of it. Today I was playing a little Counter-Strike, Jedi Outcast 2 and DeusEX without a problem. In fact, it runs faster in Linux for me, because Linux uses less RAM mem then Windows and I don't have that much of RAM either

Winex = www.transgaming.com
Wine= www.winehq.com

Other than these little issues, Linux is a great OS. Hopefully a company with enough money will one day develop a flavor, give it the hardware support it needs, driver support, and software support to make it competive for the usual computer user, the ones that can't compile source code, make programs, and just want it to work

Drivers are a problem in Linux for sure. But many companies do not really support Linux at all. They not only do not make drivers for Linux, but they refuse to describe their hardware in details making difficult for the community to create drivers for it. Other companies, as Nvidia, make great drivers for Linux, but they are not open source. Feels like they want to sell their stuff and not truly support Linux :S. toher than that, Linux is way more "Plug and Play" then Windows if you put them side by side, with an advantage that every hardware or software you add at Linux, you won't need to reboot .

On a side not I have been looking at some programs and they say stuff like untrar this then run install.sh to make this. How the heck do you go about doing this? Is thier some command interface that you need to bring up?

tar is just a compressed format as .zip, .rar, .ace, .jar. To read more about tar, type:

man tar

at the terminal. sh usually is a Linux installer. Many game installers uses sh as quake:

sh setup.sh

For more info about installing programs from source or rpm's, check this thread out:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=45094

Good luck my friend and welcome to LinuxQuestions.org

Regards

gaim is like trillian only much much better!

http://gaim.sourceforge.net/

get it now, it works with MSN and ICQ and many more

Thanks for all your replies, lots of learning to do but should be fun

Ive also found I like Mandrake ALOT better than Red Hat

Well after unistalling, reinstalling, reding, playing with, etc.
I finally settled down with Mandrake 9.2 as my linux choice, less cluttered than RH in my opinion and easier to use for me.

Got everything I was complaning above working, except for watching dvd movie, the built in player for Mandrake 9.2 seems to be missing something. Tried mplayer but compiling this and that is a bit beyond me at the moment heh.

edit
Actually some DVDs work other don't My Macross Plus DVD works fine, but Lord of the Rings dosen't/

My 9700 AIW TV tuner dosen't work, not sure where to start on that same with my MS sidewinder gamepad

Heck these are just little issues, I get these fixed and I wouldn't need to boot into Windows unless it something real specific