I totally agree. It's worth pointing out, though, that modern American Animation is not totally devoid of value. Look at The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy, Animaniacs, The PowerPuff Girls... There's a lot of good stuff still being produced, and this is certainly not a comprehensive list.
Another disturbing trend I noticed a while back is that on the rare occasions when one of the classics is aired on TV, a lot of the really funny (and violent) scenes are edited out. You don't see them much anymore, but in the early 90's I noticed that, for example, ever instance of a character shooting themself in the head was edited out.
I think Linux would be just fine. I have 2 USB mice, an Intellimouse Explorer and a little IBM optical travel mouse (for my 3 year old, the MS mouse is huge and the side buttons are positioned so that she can't grip it and reach buttons 1 and 2 without hitting the side buttons, the other one is the perfect size for her hand). I hotplug them all the time with no problems, on SuSE 8.1 Pro with the default kernel, if you care.
I know how KVMs work, or at least how they are supposed to work;-) but I don't think that would be an issue, unless the sound stream dies every time every time you unplug the audio device. I suspect that could largely be solved with scripts, though, at least on Linux.
Now... Can I listen to a CD with a friend via the telephone? Doesn't seem illegal to me? Is it? What about streaming a CD via a webcast to a friend and myself? This is very similar to listening on the telephone... Probably not legal... Why? Is this considered a "public broadcast"? What about the telephone version? Nobody would consider a telephone conversation to be a public broadcast would they?
The line between illegal and legal seems to be very arbitrary, and rather contrived.
The telephone is a point-to-point connection over a switched network, making it very difficult for anyone else to listen in. The internet is essentially a public broadcast. the difference doesn't seem particularly arbitrary or contrived to me.
Maybe they should follow the Open Source model and give the music away and make money on concerts, t-shirts, etc.;)
That's essentially how musicians make money. It's extremely rare for a musician to actually make money from their recordings, usually all that money that would have gone to them instead goes to pay off the advance they got from the record company to make the recording in the first place (you didn't think the record company would actually pay for that, did you?). Only the highest selling albums make enough money for the musician to pay off that debt.
Unfortunately, the musician is dependent on the record companies promotion and distribution to get their music out to a wide audience, which is essential if they're going to make a significant amount of money from their concerts (after paying off the concert promoter, the venue costs, etc).
That's how the music industry is: the middle-men get rich and the artists and fans get screwed.
Actually, such an economy is Fascist, since the corporations are not owned by the government. If they were directly owned by the government, it would be Communism. That's the main difference between the two.
held off on getting NWN because I wanted the Linux client. I'm a Linux user by choice, and a gamer by way of life, so I occasionally cave in and buy a windows-only game. I had planned to pick up NWN, because I'm not into RPGs and wanted to give a good looking one a try, and NWN was supposed to be supported on Linux, so what better one to try?
I couldn't have said it better, except that I am into RPGs, but generally not computer RPGs. The exception there being Daggerfall/Morrowind, which I gave up to become Windows free. I'm certainly not going back for NWN.
It's too bad, really. NWN looks like a great game, and I have several friends who are really into it, and just based on that I was looking forward to buying it. But, it's useless to me if the single-player game is crippled, so I guess that's that.
As has already been pointed out in other responses, the Linux port was planned and promised long ago. It is quite justifiable to fault BioWare for:
(a) Using a proprietary codec which doesn't support Linux, and (b) Signing such a dumb-assed contract that allows a third party to prevent them from fulfilling their promise to their customers.
Bink may not have their shit together, but it was BioWare who allowed Bink to be a show-stopper. As Obi Wan said, "who is more foolish; the fool, or the fool who follows him?"
They already went after BSD years ago and settled, with the legacy AT&T Unix code being purged from the BSD codebase. I think it's quite safe to say that SCO won't be going after BSD.
After all, if someone steals your finger, at least they won't know your PIN!
I'm fairly certain that that anyone who's willing to steal my finger would be able to get my PIN without too much additional effort. The amount of pain I'd be willing to endure for the security of any of my previous or current employers, all of whom have proven to be willing to lay me off at the drop of a hat, is vanishingly small. A believable threat would likely be sufficient, especially if my cooperation meant I got to keep my finger!
Then again, if I ever where employed by someone who actually showed any loyalty at all to their employees, I probably would endure a fair amount for them.
The lesson here is: all the technological security measures and all the best practices in the world amount to precisely dick if you've done nothing to foster loyalty in your employees. And, of course, you can't get loyalty without giving it.
I do vote with my wallet. I buy almost every copy of RedHat. I switched almost our entire business over to RedHat from Windows and NetWare.
I was speaking WRT hardware vendors. ATI is a great example of what I mean. Their cards are technically superior to nVidia's, but I won't buy them because their Linux support, while getting better certainly, simply isn't up to snuff yet. I haven't heard of any RH/ATI problems specifically, but I've seen enough posts to the ut2003 Linux mailing list about ATI related problems to give me a sense that ATI isn't putting as much into Linux as they should be. (To be honest, though, ATI's driver situation was what kept me on nVidia when I was a Windows user, so I think their problem goes deeper than simple lack of dedication to Linux.)
I have found that people will look at alternative software, BUT they don't want to change everything at one time. If they can change the OS and keep almost everything else then they would prefer to do that. Then over time they can look at alternatives like OpenOffice.
I usually take the reverse tack, presenting things like OpenOffice and Mozilla as alternatives to their MS equivalents, reasoning that if the major apps they use everyday are available on both platforms then the OS transition will go almost unnoticed. That's how I did it with my wife, and it worked out pretty well. All I had to show her was how to log me out of WindowMaker so she could log herself in on KDE.
BTW, this idea was blatantly stolen from the OpenCD project, which is an excellent place to find FOSS for Windows.
Are you sure about that? I mean, if what people really want in an OS is pretty eye-candy, why are so many of them using Windows? The only people I know who care about that stuff are either graphic artists or interface designers.
Besides, as someone else already mentioned, Linux is already on more machines than OSX is. IIRC, according to one fairly recent survey, Linux is actually on more desktop machines than OSX is.
1. Applications - Linux must be able to run a majority of the applications that Windows can. These people want to be able to walk in to a Comp USA and buy some software without having to ask for a Linux version. The only way I see this being pulled off is with WINE. It needs to get a LOT better first though. My guess is that within two to three years it will probably be there. Specifically, someone needs to be able to insert a CD and have the installer come up automatically.
The problem is that it's a moving target. Right now you can pretty much bet that anything written for Win95 will run on wine, and a lot of stuff for Win98 including just about any game at least 2 years old. What about stuff that requires XP? I wouldn't bet the farm on it. I expect things to stay that way, in the relative sense anyway. Wine will likely be at least 2 years behind the current version of Windows forever. That's just the nature of that kind of project.
Wine is great, but I don't think it's the answer you're looking for. Or maybe you're just asking the wrong question. I think the real question is: what do Mac users do? I don't hear a lot of Mac users whining about how they can't just grab any random box of software off the shelf at CompUSA secure in the knowledge that it will run on their machine.
How much of the problem can be solved by pointing the user at different sources of software? Surely the user will be happier to get for free something they would have payed $10-20 for at CompUSA.
3. Hardware - Windows has drivers for about everything. Linux is getting better, but still is not great.
I totally agree here, but let me add: please vote with your wallet. I buy Lexmark printers and nVidia motherboards and graphics cards because both of those companies have a history of supporting Linux (I also happen to like their prodcuts, but often that's the deciding factor if I'm choosing between brands).
2. Price. Linux distros need to remain cheap. Lindows is not the answer these people are looking for. These people want to load it for free and not have to pay anyone for that software again.
4. Microsoft putting good copy protection in their code. Most people that I talk to pirate Microsoft software. If they can't do this anyore, then they will be forced to start looking elsewhere for solutions.
These are two sides of the same coin, in my mind. 4 is fairly obvious; why would you consider trying something else when the you can get the OS and Office Suite 90% of the world uses for free? Most people wouldn't, because (shocking!) most people don't give a rat's ass about copyright law. Since MS doesn't give their software away for free, how is everyone getting it for free? Why, from us, of course.
My solution is to stop distributing pirated software. I present the OSS option, and make it clear that if they want to go the proprietary route they'll have to obtain it elsewhere (though I'll still install it for them and make sure it's up-to-date). Many people find that a compelling sales pitch, especially after they see the prices down at Staples, which is the only major software retailer within 50 miles or so.
As for the price of Linux, most people I talk to don't mind paying for software, they just don't like feeling like their being ripped off. When they see that MS has how much cash in the bank, and their still charging how much for their software? There's definately a sense of being overcharged. I do think that Lindows is a bit too expensive, though. If they dropped their prices by 20% I'd seriously consider trying it out. As it is, I'll stick with SuSE.
What a moron, Steve doesn't even seem to know that unix is a 30+ year old system, not just 20+.
He also doesn't know what year Windows 1 came out. They announced it in 1983 (and allegedly had a pre-1.0 demo available), but it wasn't actually released until August 1985.
But hey, it's not as if we didn't already know he was a moron...
SCO's problem is that they have no case against SuSE or Red Hat unless they first are able to demonstrate that IBM contaminated Linux with their IP. Any way you look at it, IBM has to be a player in the first round of SCO's "strategy".
According to ryan Gordon, who did the Linux port of ut2003 and has reportedly seen the code for Unreal2, the version of the engine used in unreal2 is different enough that a port would not be a simple matter. Sadly, he said that there's little chance that it will be ported at all, since it was not written in such a way as to facilitate porting. This was on the ut2003 Linux mailing list a few days ago.
I wasn't refuting your main claim, just the implication that the Unreal engine is based on continual improvement of the same technology. There are significant breaks between versions.
What I said about the possibility of Unreal2 running native on Linux is almost a direct quote from Ryan Gordon, the man who did the ut2k3 Linux port, based on his knowledge of the version of the Unreal engine that Unreal2 is based on (apparently he has had a chance to look at the source). No offense, but I'll take his word over yours any day.
There are still major differences between versions of the Unreal engine, enough so that while UT2k3 shipped with Linux support, it's unlikely that Unreal2 will ever run native on Linux. I don't know what those differences are, exactly, but that's the word from icculus on the ut2k3 Linux mailing list.
In the past, the SuSE login GUI has included the option to reboot to Windows, but that disappeared when they switched to grub as their default bootloader, leading me to believe that grub doesn't have that ability.
I realize that grub is supposed to be the way of the future, but it disappoints me that everyone is switching to it when it's still so incomplete. At the same time, though, I'm glad that I was put in the position of having to make that choice, as my love of computing has been renewed in the last 5 months.
It's not the BIOS, it's GRUB. It's a known issue, googling will bring up other instances of people having the same problem, but no solutions I could fine. The keyboard works fine everywhere else: BIOS, DOS, Windows, Linux, lilo, it just doesn't work in GRUB. I had to reinstall Windows 98SE to get it to work, which was kinda wierd, but not that big a deal since it was time for my biannual reinstall anyway. Also, for some reason it absolutely won't work through a PS/2 adapter, which seems strange to me as my understanding is that it's just a passthrough pin-swapping thing.
Anyway, I've already tried everything, but at this point it really isn't important enough to me to put more effort into it. I've made the decision to switch. If Valve/Sierra decide not to support me that's fine, I won't support them either. I'm at a point in my life where I can afford to only support vendors who support me, and I can get my gaming fix from Epic and Id.
Remember, Microsoft has to answer to shareholders. Red Hat doesn't.
Yes it does.
Red Hat is a publicly traded corporation, and therefore has just as much responsibility to its shareholders as Microsoft does. The only thing that might reduce that pressure is the fact that RH is an OSS company, so it has to play by different rules than a CSS company like MS does.
Probably because SuSE has a version that includes Crossover Office. Of course, it's a niche product, just like their various specialty server products you hardly hear anything about.
I think what it comes down to is that the OP knows nothing about SuSE, but remembers hearing that name in the same sentence as wine once.
Wine does require a license of windows to run (it requires DLLs from Windows).
Nope. I've got wine running just fine without a single Windows dll. Well, it runs fine enough to play Half-life and its decendants anyway, which is all I use it for.
Weening off of windows is always a good thing, but would it really hurt to leave a 10gig partition to play windows only games?
Yes it would, since I'm quite fond of my SGI USB keyboard which GRUB doesn't recognize, and for some reason it simply won't work on a USB->PS/2 adapter. Also, now that I've escaped, going back is fairly abhorent to me, as is the case when one finally escapes from any bad relationship.
And even if HL2 doesnt support it natively, i'm sure that the gaming version of wine will be able to pick it up within a month or two.
I'm not sure that will be a significantly less painful solution, at least for the next year ot so, when my system specs might be 2-3x the system requirements for the game.
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I totally agree. It's worth pointing out, though, that modern American Animation is not totally devoid of value. Look at The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy, Animaniacs, The PowerPuff Girls... There's a lot of good stuff still being produced, and this is certainly not a comprehensive list.
Another disturbing trend I noticed a while back is that on the rare occasions when one of the classics is aired on TV, a lot of the really funny (and violent) scenes are edited out. You don't see them much anymore, but in the early 90's I noticed that, for example, ever instance of a character shooting themself in the head was edited out.
I think Linux would be just fine. I have 2 USB mice, an Intellimouse Explorer and a little IBM optical travel mouse (for my 3 year old, the MS mouse is huge and the side buttons are positioned so that she can't grip it and reach buttons 1 and 2 without hitting the side buttons, the other one is the perfect size for her hand). I hotplug them all the time with no problems, on SuSE 8.1 Pro with the default kernel, if you care.
;-) but I don't think that would be an issue, unless the sound stream dies every time every time you unplug the audio device. I suspect that could largely be solved with scripts, though, at least on Linux.
I know how KVMs work, or at least how they are supposed to work
Now... Can I listen to a CD with a friend via the telephone? Doesn't seem illegal to me? Is it?
;)
What about streaming a CD via a webcast to a friend and myself? This is very similar to listening on the telephone... Probably not legal... Why? Is this considered a "public broadcast"? What about the telephone version? Nobody would consider a telephone conversation to be a public broadcast would they?
The line between illegal and legal seems to be very arbitrary, and rather contrived.
The telephone is a point-to-point connection over a switched network, making it very difficult for anyone else to listen in. The internet is essentially a public broadcast. the difference doesn't seem particularly arbitrary or contrived to me.
Maybe they should follow the Open Source model and give the music away and make money on concerts, t-shirts, etc.
That's essentially how musicians make money. It's extremely rare for a musician to actually make money from their recordings, usually all that money that would have gone to them instead goes to pay off the advance they got from the record company to make the recording in the first place (you didn't think the record company would actually pay for that, did you?). Only the highest selling albums make enough money for the musician to pay off that debt.
Unfortunately, the musician is dependent on the record companies promotion and distribution to get their music out to a wide audience, which is essential if they're going to make a significant amount of money from their concerts (after paying off the concert promoter, the venue costs, etc).
That's how the music industry is: the middle-men get rich and the artists and fans get screwed.
Maybe if you used a USB audio output device and a USB KVM?
I haven't tried this myself, but it seems like it should work.
Actually, such an economy is Fascist, since the corporations are not owned by the government. If they were directly owned by the government, it would be Communism. That's the main difference between the two.
held off on getting NWN because I wanted the Linux client. I'm a Linux user by choice, and a gamer by way of life, so I occasionally cave in and buy a windows-only game. I had planned to pick up NWN, because I'm not into RPGs and wanted to give a good looking one a try, and NWN was supposed to be supported on Linux, so what better one to try?
I couldn't have said it better, except that I am into RPGs, but generally not computer RPGs. The exception there being Daggerfall/Morrowind, which I gave up to become Windows free. I'm certainly not going back for NWN.
It's too bad, really. NWN looks like a great game, and I have several friends who are really into it, and just based on that I was looking forward to buying it. But, it's useless to me if the single-player game is crippled, so I guess that's that.
As has already been pointed out in other responses, the Linux port was planned and promised long ago. It is quite justifiable to fault BioWare for:
(a) Using a proprietary codec which doesn't support Linux, and
(b) Signing such a dumb-assed contract that allows a third party to prevent them from fulfilling their promise to their customers.
Bink may not have their shit together, but it was BioWare who allowed Bink to be a show-stopper. As Obi Wan said, "who is more foolish; the fool, or the fool who follows him?"
They already went after BSD years ago and settled, with the legacy AT&T Unix code being purged from the BSD codebase. I think it's quite safe to say that SCO won't be going after BSD.
After all, if someone steals your finger, at least they won't know your PIN!
I'm fairly certain that that anyone who's willing to steal my finger would be able to get my PIN without too much additional effort. The amount of pain I'd be willing to endure for the security of any of my previous or current employers, all of whom have proven to be willing to lay me off at the drop of a hat, is vanishingly small. A believable threat would likely be sufficient, especially if my cooperation meant I got to keep my finger!
Then again, if I ever where employed by someone who actually showed any loyalty at all to their employees, I probably would endure a fair amount for them.
The lesson here is: all the technological security measures and all the best practices in the world amount to precisely dick if you've done nothing to foster loyalty in your employees. And, of course, you can't get loyalty without giving it.
I do vote with my wallet. I buy almost every copy of RedHat. I switched almost our entire business over to RedHat from Windows and NetWare.
I was speaking WRT hardware vendors. ATI is a great example of what I mean. Their cards are technically superior to nVidia's, but I won't buy them because their Linux support, while getting better certainly, simply isn't up to snuff yet. I haven't heard of any RH/ATI problems specifically, but I've seen enough posts to the ut2003 Linux mailing list about ATI related problems to give me a sense that ATI isn't putting as much into Linux as they should be. (To be honest, though, ATI's driver situation was what kept me on nVidia when I was a Windows user, so I think their problem goes deeper than simple lack of dedication to Linux.)
I have found that people will look at alternative software, BUT they don't want to change everything at one time. If they can change the OS and keep almost everything else then they would prefer to do that. Then over time they can look at alternatives like OpenOffice.
I usually take the reverse tack, presenting things like OpenOffice and Mozilla as alternatives to their MS equivalents, reasoning that if the major apps they use everyday are available on both platforms then the OS transition will go almost unnoticed. That's how I did it with my wife, and it worked out pretty well. All I had to show her was how to log me out of WindowMaker so she could log herself in on KDE.
BTW, this idea was blatantly stolen from the OpenCD project, which is an excellent place to find FOSS for Windows.
Are you sure about that? I mean, if what people really want in an OS is pretty eye-candy, why are so many of them using Windows? The only people I know who care about that stuff are either graphic artists or interface designers.
Besides, as someone else already mentioned, Linux is already on more machines than OSX is. IIRC, according to one fairly recent survey, Linux is actually on more desktop machines than OSX is.
1. Applications - Linux must be able to run a majority of the applications that Windows can. These people want to be able to walk in to a Comp USA and buy some software without having to ask for a Linux version. The only way I see this being pulled off is with WINE. It needs to get a LOT better first though. My guess is that within two to three years it will probably be there. Specifically, someone needs to be able to insert a CD and have the installer come up automatically.
The problem is that it's a moving target. Right now you can pretty much bet that anything written for Win95 will run on wine, and a lot of stuff for Win98 including just about any game at least 2 years old. What about stuff that requires XP? I wouldn't bet the farm on it. I expect things to stay that way, in the relative sense anyway. Wine will likely be at least 2 years behind the current version of Windows forever. That's just the nature of that kind of project.
Wine is great, but I don't think it's the answer you're looking for. Or maybe you're just asking the wrong question. I think the real question is: what do Mac users do? I don't hear a lot of Mac users whining about how they can't just grab any random box of software off the shelf at CompUSA secure in the knowledge that it will run on their machine.
How much of the problem can be solved by pointing the user at different sources of software? Surely the user will be happier to get for free something they would have payed $10-20 for at CompUSA.
3. Hardware - Windows has drivers for about everything. Linux is getting better, but still is not great.
I totally agree here, but let me add: please vote with your wallet. I buy Lexmark printers and nVidia motherboards and graphics cards because both of those companies have a history of supporting Linux (I also happen to like their prodcuts, but often that's the deciding factor if I'm choosing between brands).
2. Price. Linux distros need to remain cheap. Lindows is not the answer these people are looking for. These people want to load it for free and not have to pay anyone for that software again.
4. Microsoft putting good copy protection in their code. Most people that I talk to pirate Microsoft software. If they can't do this anyore, then they will be forced to start looking elsewhere for solutions.
These are two sides of the same coin, in my mind. 4 is fairly obvious; why would you consider trying something else when the you can get the OS and Office Suite 90% of the world uses for free? Most people wouldn't, because (shocking!) most people don't give a rat's ass about copyright law. Since MS doesn't give their software away for free, how is everyone getting it for free? Why, from us, of course.
My solution is to stop distributing pirated software. I present the OSS option, and make it clear that if they want to go the proprietary route they'll have to obtain it elsewhere (though I'll still install it for them and make sure it's up-to-date). Many people find that a compelling sales pitch, especially after they see the prices down at Staples, which is the only major software retailer within 50 miles or so.
As for the price of Linux, most people I talk to don't mind paying for software, they just don't like feeling like their being ripped off. When they see that MS has how much cash in the bank, and their still charging how much for their software? There's definately a sense of being overcharged. I do think that Lindows is a bit too expensive, though. If they dropped their prices by 20% I'd seriously consider trying it out. As it is, I'll stick with SuSE.
What a moron, Steve doesn't even seem to know that unix is a 30+ year old system, not just 20+.
He also doesn't know what year Windows 1 came out. They announced it in 1983 (and allegedly had a pre-1.0 demo available), but it wasn't actually released until August 1985.
But hey, it's not as if we didn't already know he was a moron...
SCO's problem is that they have no case against SuSE or Red Hat unless they first are able to demonstrate that IBM contaminated Linux with their IP. Any way you look at it, IBM has to be a player in the first round of SCO's "strategy".
Nope. SCO owns the origional AT&T Unix, and also bought Xenix from Microsoft. Note that the SCO copyright starts before the MS copyright.
According to ryan Gordon, who did the Linux port of ut2003 and has reportedly seen the code for Unreal2, the version of the engine used in unreal2 is different enough that a port would not be a simple matter. Sadly, he said that there's little chance that it will be ported at all, since it was not written in such a way as to facilitate porting. This was on the ut2003 Linux mailing list a few days ago.
What is this, Soviet Russia?
I wasn't refuting your main claim, just the implication that the Unreal engine is based on continual improvement of the same technology. There are significant breaks between versions.
What I said about the possibility of Unreal2 running native on Linux is almost a direct quote from Ryan Gordon, the man who did the ut2k3 Linux port, based on his knowledge of the version of the Unreal engine that Unreal2 is based on (apparently he has had a chance to look at the source). No offense, but I'll take his word over yours any day.
There are still major differences between versions of the Unreal engine, enough so that while UT2k3 shipped with Linux support, it's unlikely that Unreal2 will ever run native on Linux. I don't know what those differences are, exactly, but that's the word from icculus on the ut2k3 Linux mailing list.
That is exactly what I mean.
In the past, the SuSE login GUI has included the option to reboot to Windows, but that disappeared when they switched to grub as their default bootloader, leading me to believe that grub doesn't have that ability.
I realize that grub is supposed to be the way of the future, but it disappoints me that everyone is switching to it when it's still so incomplete. At the same time, though, I'm glad that I was put in the position of having to make that choice, as my love of computing has been renewed in the last 5 months.
It's not the BIOS, it's GRUB. It's a known issue, googling will bring up other instances of people having the same problem, but no solutions I could fine. The keyboard works fine everywhere else: BIOS, DOS, Windows, Linux, lilo, it just doesn't work in GRUB. I had to reinstall Windows 98SE to get it to work, which was kinda wierd, but not that big a deal since it was time for my biannual reinstall anyway. Also, for some reason it absolutely won't work through a PS/2 adapter, which seems strange to me as my understanding is that it's just a passthrough pin-swapping thing.
Anyway, I've already tried everything, but at this point it really isn't important enough to me to put more effort into it. I've made the decision to switch. If Valve/Sierra decide not to support me that's fine, I won't support them either. I'm at a point in my life where I can afford to only support vendors who support me, and I can get my gaming fix from Epic and Id.
Remember, Microsoft has to answer to shareholders. Red Hat doesn't.
Yes it does.
Red Hat is a publicly traded corporation, and therefore has just as much responsibility to its shareholders as Microsoft does. The only thing that might reduce that pressure is the fact that RH is an OSS company, so it has to play by different rules than a CSS company like MS does.
Probably because SuSE has a version that includes Crossover Office. Of course, it's a niche product, just like their various specialty server products you hardly hear anything about.
I think what it comes down to is that the OP knows nothing about SuSE, but remembers hearing that name in the same sentence as wine once.
Wine does require a license of windows to run (it requires DLLs from Windows).
Nope. I've got wine running just fine without a single Windows dll. Well, it runs fine enough to play Half-life and its decendants anyway, which is all I use it for.
I think it's Win4lin you're thinking of.
Weening off of windows is always a good thing, but would it really hurt to leave a 10gig partition to play windows only games?
Yes it would, since I'm quite fond of my SGI USB keyboard which GRUB doesn't recognize, and for some reason it simply won't work on a USB->PS/2 adapter. Also, now that I've escaped, going back is fairly abhorent to me, as is the case when one finally escapes from any bad relationship.
And even if HL2 doesnt support it natively, i'm sure that the gaming version of wine will be able to pick it up within a month or two.
I'm not sure that will be a significantly less painful solution, at least for the next year ot so, when my system specs might be 2-3x the system requirements for the game.