Re: I Want to identify best Linux approach, and any pitfalls.

You don't give a budget for your system so it's hard to recommend
hardware. However here are some general rules,

1) Nvidia graphics card. Nvidia has the best Linux support. Any Nvidia
card will work out of the box and if you install the Nvidia binary driver
(which is easy to do) it will work even better. If you don't care about
performance get a $60 card, it will be good enough.

2) Most motherboards will work. For an Intel based system any board that
uses Intel bridge chips is always supported. For AMD based systems I like
Nvidia Nforce 4 chipsets but Via works fine to. You'll get the most bang
for your buck with an AMD system. I have a number of Athlon 64 systems
ranging from a 754 pin 3400+ to a dual core X2 4400+, all work perfectly
with Linux. If you want a really cheap system you could get a Sempron
based system but if I were you I'd spend a few bucks more on an Athlon64.

3) Ethernet NICs generally all work, certainly if you get an NForce 4
based motherboard there will be absolutely no problems.

4) Wireless is a pain in the ass. If you want to get a wireless chip with
native Linux support you have to be very careful. There is a way to use an
XP wireless driver with something called Ndiswrapper but it takes work to
get that to work.

For software,

OpenOffice 2.0 is very good. I like it much better than Word 2K.
OpenOffice produces nice looking PDF files so you can produce documents
that anyone can read. Importing and exporting from Word is less than
perfect. As long as you don't have to collaborate with anyone who is using
Word you won't have any problems. For spreadsheets I like Gnumeric better
than OpenOffice. Gnumeric is much lighter weight than OpenOffice and it
does everything I need.

For e-mail the best choice is Evolution. It has great filtering capability
and a wonderful feature called virtual folders. It looks just like Outlook
however it lacks Outlook's virus propagation features.

For a UI. Both Gnome and KDE should work quite well for you. I like Gnome
better, but it's really all a matter of taste. All of the big
distributions have both as well as a bunch of light weight window
managers. You can install as many as you want and switch back an forth so
you can make up your own mind about which one you like better.

Linux is not Windows, so don't expect it to look and feel like it. However
unless you are functionally retarded you should be able to figure out
how every thing works by poking around for a few hours. All of the major
distributions come with GUI control panels that are self explanatory and
easy to use. These control panels are always available from a Gnome or KDE
menu. There is also a browser based tool called webmin, available from
http://www.webmin.com, which works with most distributions. I use webmin
for most of my configuration work because it's very clean, powerful, and
self explanatory. You can also configure any machine on your network
because it works from a browser.

For the distro. Thats a matter of taste also. I like Fedora Core. However
you might want to give Ubuntu a try first. Ubuntu has become very popular
with desktop users, it's easy to install and it only requires one disk to
do the basic install. One thing you can do is when you partition your disk
for the first time create several partitions to hold different distros so
you can try a few to see which one you like. At the very least you should
create at least two separate partitions to hold OSes as well as a separate
/home partition. Even if you are only using one distribution you want to
leave room for a future upgrade.




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