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You might not have heard about Mepis because you are no longer a newbie. The author managed to find Xandros, which is good. Mepis is the other distribution which specificall aims at ease of use and has won awards for it. It's one of the better Debian installers, because it runs live and has a GUI installer. The author might have done better had he consulted a LUG rather than a Dummies book, but overall he did very well.

You're not gonna win-over an already confused user by presenting him or her with 50 more obscure and semi-obscure choices. That person is just gonna say "fuck it" and stick with what he or she knows: Windows.

The author concludes: "I'll continue to toy with Xandros, and look at upgrades of other distributions to see if I can overcome the hurdles. In exchange for a reasonable amount of time, I'd jump at the chance to gain the speed, security and savings promised by Linux -- and to feel that Microsoft has a bit more competition."

A distribution for Vaio is just what he needs and Mepis has some of the other features he missed. Mepis comes with GTK pod and Amrok, so it will talk to his iPod without help from iTunes. Because I've avoided Vaio, I can't say how well Mepis will deal with his hardware, but it should do as well as Fedora.

Also, people want to install something with staying power. Half the distros out there are gonna be gone in a couple of years, replaced by a whole new set. How can you have faith installing something you've never heard of?

Mepis has been around a long time and has a considerable user community. It's not going anywhere. Have some faith and consider your options I Mepis more than I trust Microsoft, how about you?

Here are some other, notable good starts for yourself and your children all of which are much better than what you can get from broadcast TV, which did not work so well:

• Gynaecology
• Flutes
• Nuclear Science
• Box Girder Bridges
• Irrigation
• Sahara Desert
• Medicine

Such things are not so silly anymore, now are they? Every human discovery comes from a dedicated and well educated person or team of people. People can and do all of the above things because they believe they can. The world needs mega tellers to balance it's continuing dissasters.

The simplest and most effective way to increase FOSS use and adoption now is to push for the adoption by ordinary users, not of FOSS OSes

Which is no longer true. You can't give the user ease of use on a second rate and non free platform. It will always be harder to play Bill Gate's game on Windoze than it is to take advantage of free software on your own. Yet, people have done so with great success, but the free software world is now easier.

The best way to increase software freedom is to free vendors and users from Microsoft's dominance. When users see the technical community stand up for itself and say, "this is the best software for you on technical and moral grounds," people will believe it is so. Every time you service Windows, you say the opposite. It is now easier to set up free software and migrate users than it is to maintain Windoze ports and without those ports, the platform itself will continue to wither and die. Vendors are already breaking free, which is why you see so many Linux ports and drivers now. Keep sending the right message.

For free OS set up, give them Mepis, one of the easiest to run and install Linux distributions. It runs live with an "Install Me" button on the desktop, which walks the user through a GUI dual boot install. With that one set up the user gets all of the goodies, OO, Firefox, KDE, GIMP, and so on.

With things that easy, why bother with harder stuff? Installing each of those programs onto Windoze is actually more difficult, and that difficulty is compounded by the inherent instability and malice of the platform. Bill Gates breaks what he does not like in one way or another. When that happens, the user gets a bad impression of free software as "unofficial", "non-standard" and "unsupported." The "freedom from complexity" can not really be given on a non free platform.

The desirability of the OpenCD just goes to show what a weak platform Windows is to begin with. Out of the box, Windows is feature poor. You have to spend hundreds of dollars or make unauthorized copies and risk BSA raids to get what the OpenCD provides for free.

I have to admire the people who port to Windows, but it's not really the best way to give people freedom. They go through a lot of hard work to bring some comfort to Windows users. The choices and programs they bring to such users do show people that better things exist. Overall, the user is better off just using free software from the very beginning. You know what platform you use and why. What's easier for you and better for you really is better for others too. The people you help deserve to hear it.

Go install MEPIS then come back and tell me that install is "too hard" (download)
Now this is a newbie oriented distro, and we are all quite friendly to them in the IRC channel and the forums

Yes, Windoze sucks like that but dual booting has worked since ... forever. Dual booting with lilo worked out of the box when I first tried it with Red Hat 5.x, back in 1997. I imagine it worked before that. Today, live distributions can fix GRUB on the fly, even if Windoze messes it up. NTFS resizing is safe and reliable. If the live CD boots, everything else usually works.

The news is that Apple managed to get something wrong that's been working for a decade. I half wonder if you could use Mepis to fix the mess. If you can't now, you will be able to in a few months.

Try "./progname" next time, or modify your path to include /home/username/bin if you need programs to run and you are not root. Be sure to "chmod u+x progname" first. Works great if you like to play with compilers.

And all of a sudden, you can work perfectly well again, with the occasional paste of an error from /var/log/syslog into Google

I'm glad you feel that way but things have gotten much easier than that if you use the right distribution. The average user no longer sees those errors with distributions like Mepis. The average user won't touch the command line again. When things don't work, there's more than enough local help but the local Windoze skill base is going away. RTFM is and always will be for the few people who actually care. In the free software world, there is a manual and it works. The non free world is far more frustrating and people are leaving it. I've given Mepis to plenty of people who used it and never read a man page.

Nooooo! not my AIBO. I knew I should have left off that email and news fetch hack.

What a bunch of BS. How exactly are they supposed to get this assembly code kludge to my machine? Are they going to try to barf zlib? As the article also pointed out, these things have been around since year 2000. In those six years there has been a big fat nothing done with them.

No, don't give me that "popularity" bullshit either. Linux runs most of the web and provides some of the most lucrative targets to Al Queda and other criminals. On the other end, free software run computers will always be more up to date and easier to recover. A Linux user with a misbehaving computer can fix point and click style in 20 minutes with a fairly knew distro or get the absolute latest and greatest with a net install of Debian. Computer stores can give users the distribution of their choice. Compare that to the non free world, where the user has to bring their "original" Windoze 98 or five year old XP CD into the store or pay $100 for software that might not even run on their old computer. The store then has to go through the mostly useless process of "patching" said ancient junk and the user gets burnt again soon after. The free software world, even a competitive non free world, will never be as bad as M$ is.

Mepis would be easier and more profitable. Put a few of those machines on display and Windoze piracy would drop to zero. It's too much trouble and you lose way too much by doing it.

Small computer stores make no money off software.

You have confused cause and effect. People at Microsoft are unhappy because the non free software way is failing. There is no way it can be otherwise. The anger and backstabbing you see is typical of any failing company. Tiny mistakes, which make no difference in the long run, become sources of contention. Productivity will fall off geometrically now, but even a perfect effort would not save them from the overwhelming superiority of free software.

It has been said hundreds of times and I'll say it again, the non free way of making software is obsolete. The GNU debugger has more than 87 authors. Not even Microsoft can afford to lavish that kind of effort on a single program regardless of it's importance. The "unimportant" programs are the ones that give free software systems a polished finish Microsoft can't touch. Their best five years of effort to graft together terabytes of purchased code are producing the equivalent of one modest productivity package and a window manager on top of a decidedly second rate GUI and a disaster of an OS. The free software approach, in the mean time, has produced many better equivalents on top of a unified system that fits onto a single, live running and self installing CD, which is offered by hundreds of different groups.

They can't catch up. Missing Christmas sales will hurt them. It won't hurt them near as much as the embarrassment and loss of face. The game is over. Only hardware DRM can save them and that is unlikely without IBM and other cooperation. 2007 will be the year free software takes majority market share and the Microsoft monopoly will be history.

Good riddance.

While the results are the same, the cases are different. In the spam case, they are working to turn the internet into the equivalent of broadcast TV, where only 3 companies have the right to spam. In the case of spyware and malware, they have simply purchased a snake oil vendor and will be breaking all the "products" of the other snake oil vendors. Those products never really worked to begin with but now they will act like poison.

Better you treat the dissease than they symptoms.

Someone else's or a fake name!

It would be safer for you to use an old box to set up a GNU/Linux server to meet your immediate department's needs than to be caught spending company time writing charters. A change in IT might be a sign of worse things to come. Save your skin by getting your work done while others get mired in the IT morass. Mepis, $400, and 20 minutes of your time will yield you more than a terabyte of SAMBA/SSH server to relieve most of the problems you are talking about. Fix it at home, then stick it under an unused cube.

Then try Amarok and wonder what giant waste of cycles is going on with the other programs. Amarok comes with Mepis and is an easy "apt-get install amarok" from working with Etch. Amarok is both network and culturally aware. It plays off networked boxes, so you can easily share your music with yourself without needing a 200GB hard drive in your laptop. sftp support seems a little sketchy for some reason, but I'm sure that will be fixed soon. Nice features are cover art and lyric management. It works without skipping while I work on a 1GHz laptop.

If Amarok is too heavy you can run Juk, which is also network aware and has most of what you want in a media player. Random playlists, tag sorting by artist, record year, etc, auto collection scanning and good sftp support make it a fine but light player.

Getting a decent music player that does OGG and normal USB mass transfer is still not cheap or easy. The Xiph list is informative. Iriver players are one of the few ogg players widely available. They don't do USBfs out of the box, and I suspect most "works for sure" players suck that way and you won't find a good cheap player down the street in the US. This leaves you needing to copy your music to mp3 in order to enjoy any of the bazillion cheap portable music players out there but available music managers don't deal with this very well. Even then, finding a player that also works with USBfs is hit and miss.

PDA's running Familiar, OZ or whathave you may provide a better route to music than music players do.

It's funny that he now thinks of pioneers as "loss leaders" and pledges not to enter a "market" until it's "mature". "Mature" means there's enough public awareness to buy one of the "loss leaders" for a song or crush the rest of them for nothing.

The biggest mistake, however, is to buy the core message. Free software, developed by users, blows non free software away. The "quality" software and docmentation he said could only be created by paying him is here and "flooding the market." The whole binary ecology is based on a lie. The biggest part of that lie is that there's no other way to make software and that we must sacrifice our freedom to have computers that work.

The tide is already turning. DRM'd music is making the cost of non free software obvious to everyone. The abundance of free software that anyone can download and use, blows everything Bill says right out of the water. Your children will not be able to believe that public school systems were once sued for sharing text editors.

You want to use non free software and you want it to be easy. Ultimately, you must do as the owners say. If there really was an answer, you would have found it already. If you want things to be easy, give your customers Mepis, it's not entirely free but none of the owners are as dumb as M$.

Here is a live CD that configures without user intention and has a GUI install process that takes less than half an hour without a single reboot. It contains Macromedia Flash and other commercial stuff which might be considered spyware, but you will never have to do the eight tool search and destroy topped off by the M$ upgrade train coup de grace. In their favor, they manage to configure these tools well so that you can turn them off. You also get cool stuff like open office 2.

Debian proper is not that much more difficult. When used in combination with auto configuring live CDs, even a novice can figure things out.

Red Hat, Fedora and all derivatives are similarly easy.

Sounds like a Windows problem. Power management problems are notorious there. The version that comes with Mepis seems to work just fine if you can see out of your NAT.

The only problems I have with it are how Windozy it is. Using Java might make upgrades a pain. The program has a nice looking integrated upgrade module, complete with annoying bottom right screen pop ups, yuck! Will it work with apt? I don't know yet. If it goes away, I'll drop back down to btdownloadcurses until it works or I get another Mepis CD.

Overall, I have to agree that Azureus is a very nice program as are most things distributed with Mepis.

That's a good idea. It will prevent many of the drive by attacks that give Windoze a half life of 12 minutes and it's much easier than trying to keep up with Windoze patches. With a nice little router, you might even be able to download all of those patches before you get 0wned. It won't, of course, keep your Windoze machine safe from WMF type problems, which can even get through wget.

There's a small downside to the above compared to hooking up a PC with Mepis and configuring things yourself with Guarddog and Guidedog, the KDE firewall and NAT configuration utilities. The most obvious one is that it's hard to keep up with security patches for the embedded router. It's running some kind of BSD or Linux, but you are at the mercy of it's maker for updates.

The best solution is to dump windows.

Yes.

If you don't, is that because you are afraid that They have put spyware in it?

That's part one of the many disadvantages of software having owners.

Is your tin-foil hat comfortable?

Yes, much more so than most commercial software. You should try it out sometimes. Here's a distribution that autoconfigures, runs from CD, has a GUI install and comes with some commercial software, like flash and acroread, as a security blanket.

Answer: You need a real OS.

Try Mepis and end those ugly reboots.

No, really that's the answer. Those of you with roll your own Windoze software will probably be able to run them under Wine or crossover office without fuss. Most of your users won't even know the difference and that will be that. Just remember the above next week when 100% of your users are down due to a combination of IM and email worms slamming your network, you have to disconnect and can't get anything done.

As someone who does not use M$ junk, but does have to put up with network congestion, I thank each and every one of you who will liberate their users.

More dirt bags are using the exploit, so your risk has increased. It's kind of like more people are ready to put ice where Bill Gates left a hole in your pants. When your computer goes poof, you will feel pretty naked.

the web sites are not infected, they are malicious.

A web site may serve such images without knowing it through their ad server or through vandalism. The user's perspective of those events would be that the site was "infected" with a disease that wiped them out.

For other editorial problems, send a letter to the Washington Post and other industry experts who use the same kind of language.

To save your ass, heed their warning: a big fat worm is coming that will exploit this. I'd convert my users to Mepis if I were you.

Volume makes low hardware prices, regardless of how much or little the software costs. Do you really think Dell's main customers, big dumb companies, put warez and other "crap" on their desktops? No, they usually pay the M$ tax twice because they can not use the "bundled" software provided "for free" to home and small office users. The minute Michael Dell thinks he can make more money selling computers with Mepis instead of M$ licensing headaches, he will and the people supplying him parts will be happy to keep supplying him parts at exactly the same price.

Until there are third party OEMs like Norton and Adobe offering well recognized linux tools that will help sell even more machines, Dell would make LESS on each system by NOT including windows. Twice the support costs (now they have to field both linux and windows calls) but LESS PROFIT. They would have to charge MORE FOR LESS, which is exactly what you see now.

Well recognized like DEC, Wang, OS/2? Brand name means nothing. Companies that rely on closed source sink like stones and are quickly forgoten about. Free software will outlive such nonsense. Performance and demand are everything. The performance gap between free and non free software is so tremendous the demand will only grow. We are close to the tipping point for M$. When Vista flops, and it will, it's all over for them and they can join the non free companies they so happily sank.

I'm going to be happy when the true cost of software is reflected in Dells pricing. A bare box will be cheaper than one with M$ crap on it or your favorite distro. Free software will be cheaper, because you don't have to pay licensing fees for the software, the drivers or any other part of it as you copy it.

I'll also dare to say that free software support costs will be much lower for them, due to free software's reliability. The cost of the clueless will never go away, but modern distributions are much easier to use than Windoze ever was. There will never be the cost of Melissa and all that badness.

It's an attempt to confuse users about Live CDs. "Live" sounds good and other people have made enough buzz that Joe Sixpacks is starting to hear. At this point M$ swoops down with six alternate jargon terms to confuse everyone and slow down trial and adoption of alternate desktops that blow M$'s expensive shit out of the water for ease of use and functionality.

It's kind of like the language they use about Trusted Computing. It's designed to confuse in a way that's advantageous to them. Quoted from the FSF:

When Microsoft speaks of "security" in connection with palladium, they do not mean what we normally mean by that word: protecting your machine from things you do not want. They mean protecting your copies of data on your machine from access by you in ways others do not want. A slide in the presentation listed several types of secrets palladium could be used to keep, including "third party secrets" and "user secrets"--but it put "user secrets" in quotation marks, recognizing that this somewhat of an absurdity in the context of palladium.

The presentation made frequent use of other terms that we frequently associate with the context of security, such as "attack", "malicious code", "spoofing", as well as "trusted". None of them means what it normally means. "Attack" doesn't mean someone trying to hurt you, it means you trying to copy music. "Malicious code" means code installed by you to do what someone else doesn't want your machine to do. "Spoofing" doesn't mean someone fooling you, it means you fooling palladium. And so on.

Every feature added to Windows has Microsoft control as it's ultimate aim. Every word Microsoft uses has the same goal. The purpose of that control is to keep your money flowing to them to fund yet more restrive controls.

I was in the same boat with my one year old cheapo compaq laptop. Periodically I'd download and try out some live CDs, but there would always be something that wouldn't work.

This week I tried a new version of MEPIS and everthying worked without any tweaking.

Yes that's true, and it's an anomaly that should be taken advantage of to promote free software and user control.

Sony is being made a scapegoat for the relative complexity of maintaining a secure and clean system.

What? I think you understand the issue less than your non technical friends.

The only difference between Sony's DRM and any other is that the popular press noticed and reported it. You seem to understand this, but not the implications and you underestimate your friends.

People really are angry for the right reasons. No one asks for DRM and no one selling computers or software ever tells them about it. What's sold are partial advantages of digital media. Less honest vendors promise all the advantages of digital media but actually deliver almost none of them other than portability. Cases like this show the real problem of all DRM: when you can't read and write files on your system but someone else can, that someone else owns your computer. They understand that WM / the new Napster, Ipod and others do the same kinds of things with more or less honesty about it.

Now's the time to pop in a copy of Mepis or some other good distro. The longer you wait, the more entangled in DRM trash your friends become and the more they have to lose. The demonstration is even more appropriate if your friend's computers are all crapped up.

Also look at http://www.mepis.org/. Nicely done distro!

As I said in another thread, MEPIS is a really well designed distro that installs from a live-CD.

http://www.mepis.com/

http://www.mepis.org/

Oh for an edit button! Knoppix is OK, but what my addled brain was trying to type was Mepis (http://www.mepis.com/, http://www.mepis.org/) which I prefer over Knoppix, especially if I'm actually going to install it on the HDD.

File transfers? I can swear that you're a lucky guy (girl) when it works. Usually it doesn't, resulting in embarrassing 'Sorry mate, I'm using Linux, you know and, well, could you mail me this picture instead?'.

Oh no, what's to do? I'll be ostracized for sure when I can't send you a picture or flash trash with my wimpy Unix like OS that powers most internet servers .... wait a minute.

When you need to share stuff, just IM them a link to your cable box with it's 200+ GB of whatever you put there running any of the free web servers. Distros like Mepis come with Apache and mySQL configured, just add content. For file transfer, use a tool designed for file transfer. Sure, it might be hard for your friend to return the favor, but that's because Windoze sucks.

Sharing is THE kind of thing Windoze just can't do. If your friends are cool and ditch their stupid Windoze software, you can offer them an account via ssh so they can put their content up and share via sftp graphically through KDE's excellent file and web browser Konqueror. It does not get better than that. If you try doing these things on Windoze, your going to get owned and wiped. Hell, as you noticed, you are going to get owned simply passing flash trash back and forth.

The upshot is that Free software already has tools for the job. Sure, it might be nice to have file transfers via IM, but it will never work with a Windoze client because M$ is going to break it on their end. Don't waste your effort on a legacy platform, move on and lead the rest of your friends away from all the obnoxion. The next time they come to you for help because Winblows is spitting chunks, give them something better.

MEPIS is an easier install for the "oh, the hardware is still fine?" crowd.

Don't forget to try out knoppix on a boot-off-of-cd-only basis if you're system is just fine for now. You might need it later to recover files from an unbootable windows.

FreeDOS is not your father's old DOS.

Still, I'd be happier if they would just disk image Mepis or something. It's not like the extra step would cost them anything. It would be even better if they put pressure on their suppliers to release specs so free drivers could be made.

Why not just install Mepis? What good is the best of browsers on M$?

I've had to deal with a highly infested windows system a few times. There are a lot of ways to deal with it; my favorite is reformat and hand them Mepis (or another easy distro) but some people can't handle that. I had one system in particular I couldn't completely clean up, I had logged in safe mode and cleaned, but there was still something (with no services or processes I could see running) going on. So I grabbed this Rootkit Revealer and it found my problems. It was a cinch to log in under dos and get rid of the problems (although in retrospect I could have used Knoppix or another LiveCD.

So there are good Windows rootkit revealers, you just have to look for them.

I doubt the "GNU police" have been at work thwarting you. I've been using kword on Debian Sarge to write all of my graduate level papers for the last year or so and have yet to notice your problem. The output is so good that I use the pdf's as demonstrations for Newbies, who have been confused by M$ FUD about not being able to write "complex business documents" without Word.

If you want non free goodies and fonts, try Mepis. They have a live CD with excellent hardware auto configuration as well as non free cruft like swflash, nvidia drivers and all that on top of a solidly configured debian unstable. None of that, however, change much of kword's default behavior.

Two things are being done. First, the FBI is nailing inept perpetrators as they can. This is like trying to cure a flea infestation by pinching the fleas off your friend's back. The second, more effective thing is the replacement of Windoze. Without Windoze, there will be no botnet. If you are new here, I suggest you get one of the following to improve your computing experience and help stamp out the weakness that will destroy the net:

• Mepis, auto configures and runs live off CD. If you like it, the "install me" button does it's business in 20 minutes.
• Xandros, what's left of Correl Linux, even easier for Windoze refugees with as much of the look and feel as possible.
• Fedora, Red Hat's free software offering.
• Debian Proper, harder than the others to set up but of much higher quality and easier to maintain.

With so many choices, there will never be Windoze type problems on free software. The exploits will not carry into more than 10% of the install base at a time. Go get some and take a bite out of crime.

I teach game development and do alot of 3D modelling. Alot of what you say above is false out of the box.

The state of 3D on Linux is far from sucking. Proprietary Nvidia drivers on Linux cannot be beaten, out-doing their Win32 counterparts alot of the time, even where frame rate (Q3a, Doom3, UT2004, AA) is concerned. Nvidia on Linux is an industry standard 3D animation platform in the feature film industry, for good reason. When teaching game development, if my students are sitting at machines running Nvidia binary drivers on a Linux OS, I'm having a very good day. Naturally, I'd love it if an open alternative could compete - you seem only aware of the open-source drivers, which are essentially blind to the rich talents of the Nvidia GPU. ATI's fglrx drivers are now (finally) on par with Win32 where pixel/vertex shaders (GLSL ) are concerned and close to a performance equal generally. The installation process is slightly more annoying, that is all. Many non-free distro's handle this for the user automagically (Mepis Linux comes to mind)

Secondly, binary compatibility is no more troublesome these days than it is between versions of Windows, eg running a game made for Win95 on XP - occassionally an issue. Installation of binaries can be done easily using a system like Autopackage if one doesn't want to find and or become an *.rpm/*.deb package maintainer.

Where devices are concerned, the trouble you speak of is many years in the past - udev works in userspace, and uses hotplug calls that the kernel signals whenever a device is added or removed from the kernel. Permissions, naming and control is all done in userspace.

Finally where sales of Linux games are concerned, I tend to agree that it is perhaps a little harder to market to Linux users, though from experience I am the first to buy a game that comes out for Linux. You will find though that due to existance of compatibility layers like Wine, publishers simply don't know how many Linux users are buying their games. I can account for around 14 windows games I've bought with the pure intention of playing them on Linux (for instance). Linux desktop market share is widely considered to be above or equal to that of the Apple OS. Whatever kind of market it is, it's growing.

Lastly, for the grandfather, Ryan, of Icculus is your best bet for a Linux port.

PS. Game development, as a culture, needs free software if a) small to medium sized developers are to survive and b) if micro-markets (like that of the indie-film industry) are to burgeon. Tools are increasingly expensive and publishers offset this cost with IP tradeoffs (buy outs). If I were you I'd ship the engine as free software (binary checksum for login, cheat protection and validation) and sell the data and/or subscription time. More on why here.

I wrote about this earlier today on bitsofnews.com. I'll save you the click and paste my thoughts here.

I am not sure how MS expects to keep pushing this down people's throats.
Most people don't want to be treated as thieves, and I can see some general backlash coming to MS from this.

I really don't see how this will, in the long run, benefit MS. Most people in the 1st world buy a computer from a major distributer, and use the (usually) legit copy of Windows from that. I'm guessing that that one-third number includes nations like India and China, where people can't afford the 1st world pricing scheme of Windows.

Oh, wait, silly me, why don't these poor people just use XP Starter Edition? Right. That's the ticket.

Do they seriously think this will decrease piracy in the 3rd world? All they've really done is cripple their product. They now have several issues to deal with.

This "Genuine Advantage" program is tantamount to legitimizing "pirated" XP. To many, I suspect it sends the message: "Ok, use pirated XP if you want, we'll just give special benefits to those who pay us." It's almost like a "shareware" model of distribution. Seeing how they are trying to push "XP Starter Edition", I seriously doubt this is their intent -- but it looks like they've emasculated that product entirely.

Simply, Pirated XP Home/Pro is still less crippled than XP SE. So for the 3rd world market, it's a choice between paying for a highly crippled OS, or getting a slightly crippled OS for free. I don't see many people paying for the privilege of less features.

This is also a potential gold mine for alternative OS's, such as the newer GNU/Linux systems pushing ease-of-install; Ubuntu, Mepis, Mandravia, Fedora spring to mind immediately, and there are many others.

Given the choice of a super-crippled SE, a somewhat-crippled XP Home/Pro, or a fully-functional GNU/Linux, GNU/Linux becomes an increasingly "no-brainer" solution.

If you want to install and get to use Linux right away, get SimplyMepis.

Absolutely the easiest install that I have ever experienced. Boot up the liveCD, open the installer app, click through a few screens, and reboot. Dead simple.

It will use the proprietary Nvidia or ATI video drivers, installs the Flash plugin, and lots of other goodies that make it easy to just start using it.

That's good advice, but you left out the Thunderbird mail client. The router (not SP2) will block many automated worms before they can seize your Winblows computer through something silly like a Plug and Play deamon that listens to the network. Firefox will protect you from many drive by malware sites, unless you load it up with crappy plugins like Macromedia flash. Thunderbird will protect you from many email born problems.

Because the commonality above seems to be, something non M$ will protect you, why not just run something like Mepis in the first place? The router is still a good idea, and a bonus is wifi.

Try MEPIS, dude. Get the Live CD, boot from it. Pretty sure it'll find your sound system and set it up for you .. and if you like what you see, install it onto hard disk.

Lets hear how that goes..

Try SimplyMEPIS, then. I installed it on my Dell Inspiron 600m notebook and not only was it a completely effortless install and completely effortless to use, but I didn't have to touch a CLI or text file at all. Not even to run updates, install new packages, and uninstall packages no longer wanted. Linux is free of hassles already; just choose the right distro for the right job.

• The price of your hours spent trying to get rid of that annoying adware from your mother's WinXP box: 6.1 cents.
• The number of groups ready to do the same, infinite.
• The price of a Mepis download: 0.
• Never messing with another piece of malware again: you do the math.

I've used (formerly Mandrake) Move, Knoppix, SLAX, and Mepis. Most people I know who have heard of the live CDs have heard of all of those, and a bunch more.

apt-get dist-upgrade MEPIS is NOT recommended. Also as it is based on testing it generally will not have security support (unless Mepis does their own which I have never heard of). If you really want a quick desktop/laptop Debian based distro without compatibility problems and with security support use Kanotix which is based on Debian sid/unstable. Some people dist-upgrade it daily.

nice to see 30 people give a damn about the new release of the "most popular" distro... has everyone switch to mepis http://www.mepis.org/

mepis b.t.w. is the other other debian based distro.

Sounds like you should look at Desktop distribution of Linux like http://ubuntulinux.org/ or http://mepis.org/. The latter installs in under 20 minutes from a 'try-before-you-buy' LiveCD. Click on the desktop icon elusively named "Install Me", and watch it all Just WorkTM. Every video codec under the sun, CD/DVD Burning, printing/scanning/camera, most wifi cards, ipod synchronisation and other fashionable dependencies therein.

Finding software for Linux couldn't be easier, no running around hunting an app down on websites and looking for 53r14alz. Open up your favourite package management GUI, click on "update", then "search", select what you like and finalise with "Install".

Really, there are no excuses; hence those that actually try a contemporary Desktop class distribution these days generally never look back.

I've been running unstable for about a year now and it's been very robust and remarkably reliable. The easy route was to install Mepis and upgrade. The install is smooth, lasting about twenty minutes. The upgrade can be more or less smooth, so long as you have good download speeds for the 500 MB of new libraries and programs you get. Every now and then big chunks would go away for a while, but they always came back in a month or so. Major functions, networking, printing, X, console, and all that never stop working and the system as a whole remains stable. Upgrades once a month take some work, but it's doable. Current uptimes on the two machines I abuse this way are both over, Balmer's "insane" goal of 60 days and I don't expect them to go down unless the power fails.

Windows was way more trouble and I got much less out of it.

A vaporware announcement is not an improved product. It's not beta and what's announced is not as good as freely available alternatives. If if were a fifth, I'd be drunk all the time.

During the browser wars I used Explorer instead of Netscape because I really did like it better. Certainly they have the hackers and the resources to make the best browser if they want to.

Some people sleep on nails, go figure. They have the money for a mattress but prefer the pain of broken CSS, PNG, no tabs, with all the ease of 0wnership Winblows brings.

With stuff like Mepis which installs on any hardware in twenty minutes, is there any reason to run Winblows?

If Microsoft really does release a product better than Firefox, it will be sad to see the underdog lose, but really the consumers will win.

Microsoft has never released anything better than anyone else and that's not about to be changed by another silly promise. Their stated business plan is to buy into, "mature" to avoid development costs and being a "loss leader." Do you really think M$ will deliver next year what you can enjoy right now in free software? The developers left long ago so there are no more "loss leaders" for M$ to fuck over. They may have hired a few extra people last year to try and make up for it, but that's like pissing into the free software tsunami. If Sun and AOL were to pull the plug on OO and Mozilla, Microsoft would still be wiped out by the thousands of developers working on KDE, Gnome and dozens of other alternatives.

The Mepis website says pronounce it like Memphis without the extra letters, but they didn't say which pronunciation of Memphis, the correct one, with a short e, or the one most people it the SE US use, with a short i instead of e. Since Linux users are intellectuals without equal ;), I base it on the correct pronunciation of Memphis and pronounce it with a short e.