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Mandrakelinux. I paid for and got access to their premium content, and just got through downloading nearly 12 GB of Linux distributions and premium software from them through BitTorrent. Unfortunately, it took about five days (and I have broadband). I expect a huge chunk of my downloads came directly from their seed(s) and there weren't enough, considering my download:upload ratio for the entire transfer was about 3:1.

Maybe if they had more seeds, scattered around the globe, it would have worked better. As it is, I feel cheated; if I'm going to subscribe to their service for a monthly fee, it would be nice if they would use some of that fee to give me some good bandwidth to download their product. Hell, I'd seed (limited to 1/2 my upstream bandwidth) for them if they gave me a discount or a free upgrade in subscription level.

I haven't tried Suse myself, so I can't say much about it, but I've heard good things about it also.

Oh, you mean this one? Of course, mandrake is not the only "desktop distro" out there right now, but it's the best windows replacement distro that I've found so far. I have set up a number of PCs for friends and family running mandrake and they haven't had any problems yet. Of course, some things can give you trouble (certain hardware combinations), but the fact of the matter is that people like you need to get out of their shells and realize that there are distros out there that are bridging the desktop gap. And you need to either support them or atleast acknowledge their existence.

There are far more effective solutions available here and here. In fact, you could get ahead of the curve for when people start trying to write spyware for Linux. Do a front-end to LIDS. Install it with a restrictuve ruleset, and then the front-end monitors the warning logs. If it detects something then it pops up a box saying "blah just tried to write to directory foo, do you wish to authorise this?". If the user clicks yes then add a new rule and restart LIDS. Obviously this isn't perfect as you would then have to re-run the command. It would be better to write hooks into LIDs itself for this purpose.

Phillip.

... and Mandrake

www.slackware.com
www.redhat.com
www.debian.org
www.mandrake.org
cm.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/
www.atheos.cx
www.freebsd.org
www.openbsd.org
www.netbsd.org

That's that problem solved, then. Next, please!

Hasn't anyone told the Debian team that April Fools jokes are meant to occur on *April* 1st, not May 1st? ;-)

No, seriously, this is great news. Been using Woody for 3 weeks now & am *sooooo* pleased that I^Hsomething trashed my Mandrake setup for it. I last used Debian in the 1.3 days and wish I never left it.
It says a lot when even the "Testing" branch of a distribution is far more stable than the so-called "Production" versions of others.

Justin Frankel and his nullsoft team created the popular mp3 player for windows, winamp. It was free. It was good. AOL bought them. Justin and the nullsoft team are rich. Winamp is still good and free. It's not called AOL Winamp, the presence of AOL is not there in any new version of winamp.

Winamp has never been free; you just don't have to pay for it.

RedHat, on the other hand, is free. Everything the RedHat people change, add, or create from scratch is licensed under the GPL. This means that companies such as Mandrakesoft can make other distributions based on RedHat's work.

I'm really not entirely convinced that AOL understand this, and I very very much doubt that Time Warner do.

The more I think abuot this, the more I'm glad I use Debian instead; where there is no company, there can be no buyout.

Hi, and welcome to the club. I am glad that you are now considering the transition. Just to give some of my credentials: I am ungraduate at a fairly well known university, taking computer science. I also have about 3 years of summertime employment in ASP, VB, and minimal web server management.

Well now to the point. I have made the transition to linux environment about a year ago -- and I now consider myself an average user/admin. The main question in performing the transition is to ask yourself, how much unix/linux/BSD you already know. If the answer is none -- I recommend to not do an immediate transition, but instead get a separate computer, install a distro of linux, and just play with it, to get stuff figured out and working. This step will take a few weeks of devoted time. The main thing is DO NOT GIVE UP. Linux has all the features, but if you do not know where they are, stuff won't work. In which cases post questions to those who know. Or even better yet get a book. $50 will give you up front useful info on networking, and may tell you how to get the webserver running. I am using the book Using Linux, Sixth Edition SE. It has been a lifesaver, although it is oriented towards redhat, debian, and caldera versions.

Some usefel links:

RedHat Linux

Mandrake Linux

Debian

Linux Documantation Project

I recommend downloading (or purchasing) one of the distros above. The first two try to be really user friendly, and do a decent job at it. The third one is a bit more cryptic, but you will probably want that version for your real server, since it does not have a ton of annoying unnecessary flashy things, like graphical bootup. Besides the install the real diference is update management, which both redhat and mandrake do using rpm system. It is easy to figure graphical rpm. Once you get comfortable with that, consider using that book that yau bought, along with linuxdoc (the fourth link) to figure out how to get all that networking, like VPN, DNS, etc, using the configuration files -- the only good way of setting up the network.

After you figure out basic administartion, Try getting some simple pages to learn apache.

Apache web server
Perhaps a book on apache Perl and PHP programming might help. Do not actually know any specific titles. Basic idea is the same as in IIS. There is a public directory, similar to inetpub\wwwroot. where you can put the files. I believe that PHP is most similar to ASP. And since you did not use SQL server for database access, but Access, I assume that you do not need the speed of a full blown server. In this case MYSQL will do the trick. For something more significant you should check out Postgres db, or a commercial product such as db2. Learning these will take some time, but remember, these things have been written with an simplicity in mind. It just takes a little bit, to see where this simplicity is.

Well this msg is already too long. To sum it up, do not throw away your old system yet. Take time to learn linux, and in a little time you will possess the necessary skills to do transition. As for the tools that will make the transition for you, I have not heard of them, however they probably do exist. And starting somewhat anew is not always a bad thing. A lot of us hope that some version of windows will be written anew, but I doubt it will happen.

Well, good luck! The switch is not easy, but there are plenty of benefits in the long run. Do not give up, and you will see them soon.

. . . who has been playing with Linux for two months, I like Mandrake. I have tried Debian, Red Hat, Progeny Debian, and Mandrake.

Progeny Debian was my first test case. I like the principles behind Debian, but was intimidated by accounts I'd heard of the horrible installer. So when Progeny said "We're like Debian, but with a better installer and auto-magic hardware detection," I said "Great!"

That didn't work. For some bizarre reason, it couldn't see my PS/2 ports in XFree86. I could use my keyboard fine at the command line, and my USB mouse worked quite nicely. But.

So next I went straight on to plain old Debian (2.2r3). And the installer was not as bad as I heard. It got the job done well enough. So it's not pretty -- so what?

The apt-get command makes maintenance really easy. When I'm in Debian, my sound card only works if I'm logged in as root, which probably has something to do with device permissions. It's a good distro, but not for the faint of heart. I spent four days trying to install accelerated drivers for my nVidia TNT2 M64. It involved recompiling my kernel 6 times and STILL not getting it right (unresolved symbols in my modules). Eventually, all the mistakes I made rendered my system inoperable. I had to format the hd, buy a new one, and give Windoze and Linux separate living quarters.

Red Hat installed fine. I liked the option to do a "partitionless install" although I didn't use it. That might be a powerful recommendation to a total newbie who wants to play with Linux without a) giving up Windoze, or b) repartitioning. On the other hand, Red Hat uses Gnome by default. It's okay, but KDE is so much more polished.

The Mandrake installer was really cool. Not only that, it detected my TV card and had drivers for it, something which none of the other distros did. It uses KDE, and the selection of games that comes with it rocks. Pingus rules! Furthermore, it gave me the option to use an accelerated driver for my graphics card right there in the installer -- no mucking about with kernel recompilation in this distro!

Based on these experiences, I would recommend Mandrake. One caveat: when selecting partitions to format, the yellow star means that the partition is selected. There was no indication which color meant selected and which not -- choices were purple and yellow. I guessed wrong and formatted the Windoze HD by mistake. No data loss (backups are key!) but reinstalling and configuring is a pain. I mean, a checkbox would have done as well. Or perhaps the stars could have been green or red.

Anyway, I currently have Debian, Red Hat, and Mandrake on my second hard drive. I'm still evaluating them -- I haven't picked my favorite yet. But just based on the experiences, I'd say try Mandrake first. Oh, and if you have multiple distros on one disk, a boot partition for your kernels and loader helps a lost!

Oh, I almost forgot. Several months ago, I briefly flirted with DragonLinux , a customized version of Slackware which lives inside a giant file on a regular Windows partition. Avoid it. I couldn't even get X to run in that thing, never mind anything else.

Selanit

eh, have you never looked at Linux Mandrake. It's probably easier to install than anything from M$, and has anything any Joe Average would want to use (Apache, MySQL...). No massive learning curve there ...

We should all encourage, and monitor, our children's internet useage. For that matter, kids should be encouraged to learn regardless, but the Internet is what makes learning beyond traditional means possible. I know my library has very few books on Linux, or Eagle Talon's, or case modding, or religious persecution, but thanks to the Internet, that info is easy to find. Make sure they're not getting into things they shouldn't, but encourage learning, and a self-motivated desire to learn. It will aid them greatly in their lives to 'love to learn.' It's helped me, and I didn't even have the Internet until I went to college. Just think what I could have learned in grade school if I had.