Some folks in Norway have come up with an online "quiz" to help you decide which distro would be best for your needs.

You'll find it at:

Linux distro chooser (beta)

It told me I should try Kubuntu, Mepis (both of which I've tested) and Xandros which I've used on one of my machines for over a year.

[ 06 January 2006: Message edited by: radiorahim ]

http://www.freebsd.org/

FreeBSD is not "linux" - what makes it different is that its a true Unix in the full sense of the word but more importantly is a complete operating system - from kernel to userland, its designed to be shipped as one. There are no "distros".

Its "ports" and cvsup system is an excellent facility for installing and upgrading and maintaining your system.

I use FreeBSD in my business to run web, database and application servers (as does Yahoo); I also run X-Windows (xfce4 as a desktop/window manager) on FreeBSD in my office.

Its worth a look if you are not already far down the Linux road for some reason, and especially so if the goal is to get exposure to different OS's.

Free, too, of course.

[ 08 January 2006: Message edited by: Michael Watkins ]

Doubly so because I had to guess at some questions: I know about partitioning, but I've never attempted it personally, I might be Intermediate, I might be Advanced, etc..

quote:

---

Originally posted by Brian White:
Is there a version for amd 64?
Also, do you dual boot?
Also, have you ever tried Solaris?
There is open solaris now too and solaris has a reputation for security. amd 64 version?
My main gripe with windows is viruses. When i used it as the main os, there were virus losses of work and data all the time.
Linux never gave me that problem.
I did try and put free bsd on my computer (Old thing) and it did not want to install.
Solaris is probably too programmy for me though.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Brian White:
Is there a version for amd 64?
Also, do you dual boot?

---

There is indeed a 64 bit version of FreeBSD for AMD64, as well as installation images for IA64, PowerPC, Alpha, sparc64, pc89, and, of course for most Intel users, i386 machine architectures.

As for security - FreeBSD has a good reputation there as well; other *BSD variants specialize in this area (OpenBSD) but for the average user, FreeBSD is more accessible and certainly has a much larger user community.

Dual boot is available and relatively easy to configure. Myself I don't bother; all my windowing desktops are FreeBSD except for one single machine which unfortunately runs a Windows-only application I can't live without at present (a business app). All other work I do - development, office admin, QA/testing, documentation, email and the usual, is done on FreeBSD.

quote:

---

Originally posted by rasmus raven:
For an absolute beginner, at this stage, I think I would recommend Kubuntu.

---

One thing though is that its a bit of a pain with some multi-media formats and things like bittorrent and P2P software "out of the box". I suspect its because the target is a bit more the corporate desktop and for that I think it would be fine.

For that kind of stuff, I've found Mandriva and anything Debian-based is a bit easier.

If you don't have a highspeed internet connection and aren't familiar with burning "ISO images" (though lots of babblers could walk you through it) then another cheap (though not free) way to get Suse 10.0 would be to hit a "large" Chapters/Indigo store and pick up the latest edition of one of the British Linux magazines. It seems all of them this past month or so have a copy of a Suse 10.0 DVD disk with the magazine.

Look for "Linux Magazine", "Linux Format" or "Linux User and Developer". They run about $20...a little on the pricey side.

The "live CD" is a great way to test out Linux. If you have a decent capacity USB thumb drive you could just about completely run off a live CD version if you wanted to.

As for installing on a machine, what I recommend is installing on a "spare" clunker box computer at first. It's a no risk proposition. Also you can play with a number of distros till you find one that you like.

You just gradually teach yourself how to do all the things you used to do on Windows the Linux way. Over a period of time you'll pick it all up and eventually kiss Windows goodbye.

So mostly I just sit here wanting to do it but not able to make that step. Bleah.

[ 17 January 2006: Message edited by: asterix ]

quote:

---

I've been seriously pondering a Linux switch myself...but I'm still just a bit afraid to actually take the plunge. I don't have a spare clunker to run it on, and can't afford to buy one, so my only option would be either to install it on my existing computer as a dual boot or to just go whole hog and trash Windows completely, and I'm not at all confident that I wouldn't screw those options up.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by asterix:
I've been seriously pondering a Linux switch myself...but I'm still just a bit afraid to actually take the plunge.

---

I'm a windows user (XP) and I personally love the OS and never, I mean have never, had a problem with XP. No virus, no crash, nothing. I'm moderately windows savvy so I have thus far had a pleasant computing experience. I mainly use my machine for the internet and gaming. I get all my software, including my XP OS from P2P.

From what cursory glances I have given Linux, it just seems simply more complicated to perform tasks. I see alot of \mount\p or some such to do something in windows that would require a mouse click. Yet I also hear people saying that once you get used to using Linux, you'll wonder why you ever used windows. So, I'm curious, of course as to why people are saying this when to my mind they are both just OS's and one (Linux) is simply more complicated to navigate than the other. Does Linux serve you breakfast in bed, or what?

So I guess I thought I'd pop in and ask what the heck is so great about Linux, because you are all making me feel like I'm missing out and I can't have that!

Forgot to mention, I took the test and it said Mandriva.

[ 17 January 2006: Message edited by: Maritimesea ]

As for what's so great about Linux, maritimesea, I can't speak for others, but for myself, I'll say a few things. I ran a linux distribution based on the 2.2.19 kernel, which is 2001 vintage I think, for four years. Now, that kernel was of legendary stability. (The current 2.6.x series is not as known for its rock-solid stability, from what I have read, but I've NEVER had a crash with my new install). Once I got up to speed and had all my software installed, it never crashed. I even forgot how to do all the configuration, because I never needed to. It was rock-solid and predictable. I used to use Windows 98 and it crashed all the time. What was more irritating was the bossy design. It was hard to tweak because the default assumption is that you are a complete idiot. When it crashed and the start-up message blamed YOU ("remember to always choose shut-down from the start-up menu") that would infuriate me. Software always came with more bloat and crap than you needed, and it was hard to get the gunk out. The whole experience is of patronizing manipulation and bossing. The Windows registry is just a monstrosity in my experience. Windows also looks like hell. They just don't care enough to hire designers Even some Linux desktops pay more attention to design. That being said, from what I have seen, XP is a stable operating system built on modern (ie 1970s) principles, indeed, the network stack was more or less stolen from BSD, a flavour of unix. I've rarely seen it crash, but on the other hand power tweaking, even if it is point and click, isn't all that much easier or more intuitive than with Unix. I find when I'm on Windows a lot, I'll install Cygwin with a full suite of Unix utilities and use some of them in preference to the bloated Windows apps.

But if your interest is gaming, video editing, or graphics applications, unless you are using very high end custom-written software, Mac or Windows are going to be better choices for you.

[ 18 January 2006: Message edited by: rasmus raven ]

I have never seen a Windows distro allow proper multi-tasking. The issue is memory allocation. Maybe XL solved that; I don't know.

Windows is a security hole! Need I say more? The world's worst viruses have no effect whatsoever on my Linux box. The only thing which knocks this box off its rails is when the hydro fails; but afterward, journelled file system remembers where it was and the whole thing reboots without loss.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cougyr:
Windows is a security hole! Need I say more? The world's worst viruses have no effect whatsoever on my Linux box.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by scooter:
. . . you will not have virus problems but it opens you up to all sorts of other security issues.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cougyr:
Such as?

---

Then there is the RPM hell when you upgrade something and other software is installed without your knowledge (i.e. don't use rpm -U).

quote:

---

Originally posted by scooter:
To clarify the security issues, the majority are related to the software running on linux, not the kernel itself.

---

I run a Debian variant with my own passwords and the Firestarter firewall. And I use the 2.6 kernel. I shutdown the ports that I don't use.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cougyr:
I'm sure the CIA could break in, but the kid next door can't.

---

But now I can't seem to get my internet connection working on the Linux side. I followed the directions provided by Sympatico for their available-but-unsupported Linux connection manager as closely as I could (they're not particularly well-written), but I just can't seem to get it to configure properly.

I suspect I'm going to love Linux once I get this sorted out...but at the moment I'm a bit frustrated by the fact that there's almost nothing I can do with it until I get the connection working. (It's not a problem with the ethernet card or the modem -- they both work fine in Windows.) I don't suppose anyone would know how to help me figure out what I'm doing wrong?

[ 18 January 2006: Message edited by: asterix ]

In the meantime, I'm starting to see the exact same problem on this WinXP that caused this computer to crash last December: Outlook Express acts up with messages like "not enough memory" and the "From" and "Subject" fields disappear from every message. Anyone have any idea what the hell is going on?

quote:

---

Originally posted by asterix:
But now I can't seem to get my internet connection working on the Linux side.

---

The Internet runs upon protocols which are exactly the same whether using Windows or Linux, or any other OS. So, go into your Windows side and get the information. Then put it into your Linux side. Tell us which distro and somebody here can probably tell you where it goes.

quote:

---

Originally posted by scooter:

PHP security problems, using default passwords, leaving ports open, using default ports, linux services, problems with PNG and GIF image libraries, not implementing proper security policies, running pre 2.6 kernel, misconfiguration, not using authentication certificates, X11 security issues, not setting up a firewall, not keeping current with security upgrades, not monitoring for hacking attempts.

Then there is the RPM hell when you upgrade something and other software is installed without your knowledge (i.e. don't use rpm -U).

To clarify the security issues, the majority are related to the software running on linux, not the kernel itself.

---

Seems to me that all the "security" problems you originally suggested Linux has with the statement: "opens you up to all sorts of other security issues" certainly isn't reflected in this list you present here. You do "clarify" the security issues as saying they are software related running on Linux. But this isn't entirely a correct assumption either. For example, PHP runs on Linux as well as Windows. Using "default ports" (whatever that means) is not in itself a security problem. "not implementing proper security policies", "misconfiguration", etc. seem to me to be a user problem rather than some sort of inherent insecurity issue with Linux. Most Linux distros I've got direct experience with quite adequately provide proper security policies right out of the box without the need for any further tweaking unlike Windows which provides new users it creates with administrator rights during installation.

quote:

---

Originally posted by asterix:
Got it working, finally. Seems the part Sympatico didn't tell me about, but the Ubuntu help pages did (once I knew what terms to search for), was the existence of a config utility called pppoeconf which did everything for me. Works like a charm now.

There's still going to be a bit of a learning curve before I'll be ready to seriously consider ditching Windows altogether...but I've been idly wishing I could ditch Windows for years, so even just finally getting off my butt to explore another option is progress

---

Then (after closing "add applications") I would start "Synaptic" under the System>administration menu. Under "settings" choose "repositories". Click on the add button. This brings up a dialogue with a drop-down menu. I just used this to add all the repositories (all four checkboxes) for each thing in the drop-down menu. You probably won't need the source repositories yet, but I do and eventually you might. This adds a very complete set of packages you can choose to download. There's only ever been one application I wanted that wasn't in there. I LOVE the apt-get/Synaptic package management system. It's my favourite package installation system of any OS.

When I learned linux, back in the day, I read O'Reilly's "Running Linux" and depending on you, you might be interested in doing the same. Also, the Ubuntu forums or mailing list will be full of people eager to help you. Otherwise, Ubuntu is a much more user friendly distribution than any other in my opinion.

Yeah, the pppoeconf is poorly documented.

One little gotcha I found in Ubuntu is in its DVD players. Because the css codec is not legal on linux in many jurisdictions, or whatever I mean, it is not bundled with Ubuntu. But there is a script somewhere there on the system which will automatically fetch and configure it for you. It took me a while to figure this out. After that, it will play DVDs great.

[ 18 January 2006: Message edited by: rasmus raven ]

quote:

---

Glad to hear that you got it working asterix. It'll be interesting to see how your Linux experience goes. If you are like many of us who took the leap, the migration from Windows to Linux spanned a period of time until one day we realize that most of our productive time is spent within Linux and Windows is very seldomly booted up. And when it is, its kludgyness (such a word?) becomes more and more apparent. :-)

---

Glad you got it working asterix! Welcome to the world of Linux babblers! I was going to post to look for the PPOE stuff...but while I was typing my message and switching to do something else on another machine I noticed you got it up and running.

If you get a router...cheap these days. It does make things a whole lot easier and you can add additional machines on with ease. I recall back in my Win9X days that the Sympatico connection software wouldn't even install on a machine older than a 166 MHz. Pentium. I remember back a few years ago trying to install it on an old Pentium 133 running WinNT4 and it wouldn't work. Come to think of it...still have the old beast and have been trying to get someone to take it home with them

quote:

---

So I guess I thought I'd pop in and ask what the heck is so great about Linux, because you are all making me feel like I'm missing out and I can't have that!

Forgot to mention, I took the test and it said Mandriva.

---

Well one of the things that Linux users are "not" missing are the viruses, trojans and spyware! Quite true that nothing is perfect but "out of the box" its more secure and it trains you to keep your "administrative" side away from the "user" side of things.

I've cleaned up too many computers where someone's eight year old kid has admin rights on the family machine.

Mandriva is probably the best of the RPM-based distros...I run it on my notebook. Either that or one of the easy Debian-based distros.

quote:

---

One little gotcha I found in Ubuntu is in its DVD players. Because the css codec is not legal on linux in many jurisdictions, or whatever I mean, it is not bundled with Ubuntu. But there is a script somewhere there on the system which will automatically fetch and configure it for you. It took me a while to figure this out. After that, it will play DVDs great.

---

If I remember correctly its "libdvdcss2" that you'll need to install. You can do it with either Synpatic (graphical) or apt-get (command line).

To install the css codec for DVD playback, you need to run a script. You could in reality do all this using only the windows navigation system and point and click. However, as you will learn, it's often faster easier to do it on the command line (same is true in Windows and Mac OS-X). So open up a terminal under Applications>accessories. Type in "sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/install-css.sh" "sudo" is a command giving you superuser powers, so you have to enter your password. This script will fetch and configure everything automatically.

Actually, for the windows format files you need to download http://avifile.sourceforge.net/binaries-011002.tgz and decompress/untar it into /usr/lib/win32/. This is going to involve a little more work on the command line. In the terminal, type "ls". This will list the files in your home directory. You should see binaries-011002.tgz. Now, do "sudo mkdir /usr/lib/win32". "mkdir" makes a directory called "win32" in the directory /usr/lib. As a normal user, you don't have write permissions there, which is why you need to do "sudo". We want to move the windows codec file there, so do "sudo mv binaries-011002.tgz /usr/lib/win32/". Now change directories by doing "cd /usr/lib/win32". You want to unzip the file. Again, there is a graphical utility to do this but it's easier just to type "sudo tar -xvzf binaries-011002.tgz". That's it. (There are actually shortcuts I could have taken there.)

Real won't let realplayer be bundled so you have to get the installer from the Real website. It's an easy windows-style install. The nice thing about Realplayer in linux is that it isn't a bloated 100MB adware monstrosity.

Acrobat Reader is not installed as the default pdf reader. For reading pdfs I find it clearly superior. You can install it through Synaptic.

The firewall is not enabled by default. Go into Synaptic and install firestarter. I think there's a wizard that will start it up for you -- look under Applications>System tools>firestarter. If you start any services like SAMBA (Windows file sharing) or sshd (for secure remote login) then you have to open the port through the handy firestarter interface. Anyway, if at all possible it's good to have a dumb firewall equipped router between your computer and the internet.

As far as I know, that covers most of the things that aren't explicitly explained for new Ubuntu installs.

ETA:

A wiki on restricted formats in Ubuntu

[ 25 January 2006: Message edited by: rasmus raven ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by rasmus raven:
I don't know. I do know that SuSE supports online installation, but I've never done it. There should definitely be a how-to. The susewiki is pretty good.

---

Yeah I saw the online installation option and actually, considering the question I previously posted, that would be ideal. But I just do not feel confident in my ability to configure my network before I've even installed the OS. I have adsl, by the way.

However its much easier... and far faster.... to download the one or two ISO's required and make a bootable CD and go from there.

I'd recommend a CD or DVD install instead.

If you don't want to get into downloading ISO's, head down to a large Chapter's/Indigo store. I'm sure there's one in the Halifax area. Go to the magazine rack and pick up one of the British Linux magazines. You'll find Suse 10.0 DVD disks attached to some of the recent issues. Look for "Linux Format", "Linux User and Developer" and "Linux Magazine".

That way you won't have to worry about downloading and burning "ISO images" for the time being...not that it's hard.

I think you'd find FreeBSD a bit difficult if you're new to *nix operating systems.

I tried it once (think it was Version 4.1) about a year ago and got lost in it. Mind you it might be a little easier now.

I took the quiz--it told me I should be running Mandriva. That's cool with me because I am running Mandriva, and quite happy with it. I do boot into Windows now and then to play Warcraft, though. If they ever perfect Wine, that partition gets wiped.

Incidentally, as to the satisfied Windows user who wanted to know what's so great about Linux. Couple of things. It can in some ways be complicated--but that stuff you were saying about cd-rom drives, it hasn't been like that for years. Day to day, it runs pretty much like Windows really.
What do I like about Linux?
Well, first of all I should come clean and say I run Linux to a fair extent for political reasons. I like the concept of Free Software, I think it's just fundamentally a Good Thing. Anyone who likes freedom and bottom-up organization should run Free Software where possible. And I don't much like monopolies, and I don't like a whole lot of stuff I've heard about Microsoft's business practices.

Driver support is pretty good; I personally have not had any issues with drivers, but then I do try not to buy the most esoteric stuff either.

I chose FreeBSD over Linux myself long ago for a couple of primary reasons:

- the OS is a complete OS - top to bottom; its unlike Linux distributions where you've got a packaging of kernel + otherstuff = distribution. Sounds like a minor distinction and in most respects that is true, but I rather like the development process FreeBSD follows (I worked for a big Unix vendor for many years and the FreeBSD dev process felt more familiar to me) and that it isn't ultimately dependent on one dictator, however benevolent that dictator may be.

- its not a unix clone (Linux is a clone, however close), it is Unix. Practically this doesn't matter much, but as we've seen with the SCO vs Linux battle over the last few years, licensing can cast a bit of a shadow over things at times. I was choosing an OS for a variety of purposes including for business and this was important to me.

In my case FreeBSD fit a little better than Linux; but I've used both extensively and these days if I were to do it again I might tip either way.

If learning *nix, either are good choices. The knowledge you gain in one will not be wasted; the differences between the two tend to be in areas that, once you are proficient in one, you'll quickly recognize in any other.

Not sure if you know this, but you shouldn't run your desktop as root, just in case.If you're surfing the internet it leaves you too exposed to security vulnerabilities. And it's too easy to mess things up by mistake. Log in with your user account. Almost any administrative task can be done through the YaST graphical utility which appears in Applications>System and also under Desktop. If you need command line root access just type in "su" in a terminal (start from the applications menu) and it will prompt for the root password and give you a root shell.

Its one of those bad habits that was re-inforced by M$ in the Windows 9x days when every user had full privileges on the system.

Even when Windows finally put some user tools in Windows 2000/XP the default was to run as "administrator". Because folks had been "trained" the wrong way, most Windows users don't even use the available tools i.e. to create "restricted" users...and therefore constantly run into trouble.

I can't believe how many Windows systems I've fixed where someone's eight year old kid has full administrative permissions on the family PC.

Many Linux distributions give you dire warnings about running as root. Often the GUI has a red background when you're running as root as a warning sign for you to watch what you're doing.

The good thing though is that unlike Windows, most Linux distros make switching between users relatively easy. If you try to do something that requires administrative (root) privileges from a user account a little dialogue box pops up asking your for the administrative password.

Windows hasn't implemented multi-user functionality very well and so its a royal pain in the ass. And since its a pain in the ass, its another reason why Windows users don't do it...and leave their systems vulnerable.

Another reason is that there are still Windows applications around that either won't work at all or don't function properly unless you have administrative privileges.

Linux isn't like that and so its one very basic reason why Linux is more secure than Windows.

BTW Suse is okay. All of the open source applications are very up-to-date. The weakness I've found though is in multimedia support...with all the proprietary formats. "Out of the box", the only way you can play mp3 files for instance is with RealPlayer.

The whole modular aspect of suse, and I assume all linux distros is what impresses me the most. Whereas in windows if you break something like windows media player, you'll generate system errors up the yin yang until you get it fixed. But it doesn't seem to be the case with linux.

Besides, why would you bother doing all that GUI tweaking for the root account when you shouldn't even be using the GUI desktop as root? If you need to so something as an ordinary user that requires root privileges then just su to root (or sudo) and do what you need to do and then get the heck outta there when done.

Here's an article dealing with some of the multimedia stuff in Suse 9.3/10.0

Suse 9.3/10.0 multimedia article

I haven't really bothered on my Suse 9.3 box because its one of my slower machines (K6II-400 MHz.)

...and yes...for your own good...get out of the root account

[ 30 January 2006: Message edited by: radiorahim ]

cp -r /root/ /home/yourusername/
chown -R yourusername.users /home/yourusername

Replace "yourusername" with your actual username and leave everything else as is.

There are some things I really love about Linux -- it's a lot more stable, I like the design...and I like the fundamental idea of supporting open source rather than Bill Gates.

I do have a few points of complaint, however:
* I have yet to find a fully satisfactory audio player. Rhythmbox is just the pits -- it took almost 15 minutes to scan my fair-sized-but-far-from-huge MP3 collection (by contrast, Winamp takes less than a minute), and random read errors keep messing up the CBC Radio Three stream. So I tried virtually every other audio player I could find in the package installer, and every one of them had a different set of problems. I really dislike how much of a memory hog Winamp can be, but at least it works.
* The bootup sequence takes far too long to "configure network connections".
* I'd like to uninstall some of the games (I am never going to play Robots or Stones), and I'd like to use Thunderbird rather than Evolution for e-mail...but I'm not particularly comfortable doing anything that requires me to uninstall "ubuntu-desktop" at the same time. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but I'm pretty sure the desktop isn't supposed to be dependent on the applications -- shouldn't that be the other way around?

So, all in all...I'm intrigued, but not yet sold. I still generally boot into Windows to actually do most things, and only boot into Ubuntu when I'm specifically in the mood to play around with Linux. But, again, it's only been two weeks.

[ 31 January 2006: Message edited by: asterix ]

Have you tried out amaroK as a music player? I love it and think it's the best I've seen for on any platform. In my setup I have it store my music collection in a mysql database. The thing is instant when it comes to calling up albums or songs to play.

On the question of the bootup taking a long time to configure the network connections ... I don't use Ubuntu, so don't have any direct experience with it. But with those Linux systems I'm familiar with, I don't find that an issue and the boxes although very seldom ever rebooted, when they are, they get to the desktop much faster than XP. Then again, I have assigned static ip's to my boxes, so maybe that is something you could look into doing?

Cheers.

[ 31 January 2006: Message edited by: rbil ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by asterix:
So it's now been two weeks for me. I do have a few points of complaint, however:

---

* I have yet to find a fully satisfactory audio player.

Try `slimserver` (google it). Overkill if you have a single machine / single listening station. I store music on my FreeBSD box and listen to it on a number of machines on my home network, but primarily play it through our audio system.

* The bootup sequence takes [i]far too long to "configure network connections".[/i]

Gnome and KDE are big integrated Window Managers and Desktops; when you move to Linux / FreeBSD / Unix you have the potential to get a slimmed down system that does just what you need it to do and nothing more; but the big WM/desktop environments bring you back to the level of complexity approaching MS Windows. Not quite, and better still, but big. And therefore more resource hungry and slower.

I use a slimmed down desktop / window manager environment called XFCE. Provides enough capability without doing too much. Boot time is not an issue for me.

http://www.xfce.org/

Actually what I tend to do is keep a Gnome environment up to date on my box, but I don't use it. Many applications I use have either or both Gnome or GTK2 dependencies. Once in a while I fire up the latest Gnome to see where its at, and a few days later go back to XFCE. Its fast and relatively lightweight, leaving more resources available for the dozens of applications I tend to have running all at once.

* I'd like to uninstall |snip| ...but I'm not particularly comfortable doing anything that requires me to uninstall "ubuntu-desktop" at the same time.

I'm not familiar with ubuntu but doing this sort of thing on FreeBSD is as simple as

pkg_delete evolution-2.4.1

If you install a big "meta" package that installs a lot of sub packages (such as Evolution) you'll get some dependency warnings of course. But generally speaking you can ignore such things, with a little care to what those dependencies might be.

Bottom line: no doubt the *nix way involves more work and learning, but if you like to tweak, unix - once you climb the learning curve hurdle - is a tweakers paradise. You can **tweak a unix box, well, forever.

As for the various audio problems, on my original linux machine I happily used freeamp, but this doesn't seem to have developed much since then. I haven't experimented much with different formats, but my experience suggests that restricted media are where you have to do the most fiddling at first, and also, these tend to be poorly documented by the companies that release linux distributions. The problem is not intrinsic to the linux system, rather, it is related to intellectual property laws, licensing regimes, and controlling customers by locking them in to proprietary formats. Linux distributors can't or won't legally bundle most proprietary formats in their releases, and they don't want to seem to be winking at law-breaking by providing detailed instructions on how to do so, is my guess. So you have to find this on your own. Once you have something set up and working, it should last a while, though, without further ado... until Microsoft, Apple, or whoever comes up with even more restrictive proprietary formats that you want to use. For example, Windows Media Video 10 codecs use digital rights management technology that hasn't been worked around yet.

Other than that, wireless is where you will have the most difficulty, unless you are into serious graphic design or video editing, and can't afford custom software.

For basic tasks, like office documents and so on, email, web browsing, linux is now fine. For watching/ripping DVDs, it also works well. Networking in general has a wider range of readily available tools.

I'm surprised by your long boot time with the network connection. My system boots up extremely fast. In fact slow boot times drive me nuts, especially on Windows XP when people have ten million little startup items. You are using ADSL, no? When I once tried to make a direct connection using an ADSL modem (ie no router), I recall pppoeconf on Ubuntu took a long time. A quick google shows that there appears to be at least one
known problem in PPPOE with this Ubuntu release, which is unfortunate, considering this is a basic part of the system. The problem went away for me when I connected via a router. Whatever your operating system, in this day and age I would suggest putting a router between your modem and your computer. Broadband routers are pretty cheap now, if you don't want wireless. Besides the added security of another firewall layer, they are very good at networking -- do some research first, though -- and too dumb to do much else, like get infected with viruses etc. I have an extra little router lying around if you want it.

You could also try installing the Roaring Penguin rp-pppoe client independently, it might give you different results. Apparently Debian, which Ubuntu is based on, recently integrated pppoe into the kernel and there are some hiccoughs.

[ 31 January 2006: Message edited by: rasmus raven ]