Ubuntu
 

Any of you running Ubuntu or Kubuntu? I have been playing with Linux off and on now for years, but never gave it more than a few days run at any given time. Finally, I have decided to run a dual boot and see what I really think of it. I know that Ubuntu runs Gnome and Kubuntu runs KDE. I do like pretty icons and such and, from what I have read, KDE has more of the flashy stuff. However, I have also run Macs and think that interface is perfectly fine. I think it is more like Gnome. Then, with Beryl, I get all kinds-o-fun.

I have done some reading at some of the Linux sites, but most of the discussion there is not very intelligent when it comes to choosing one over the other.

Of course, there is always the option of loading both...

I've been running Ubuntu Feisty for a while now. I only boot into XP for one game that doesn't run satisfactorily under Wine. I played around with KDE for a while, but I think I like Gnome better. I also can use a (much older) version of Gnome on our Solaris 9 machines at work.

I can back-and-forth it with my single install of Ubuntu without any difficulties.

I suggest you try VMware Player. It is a free application which will aloow you to try out a number of different flavors of Linux under windows. And its free. More info and download here.

http://www.vmware.com/download/player/

Then if you want to get serious, you can try VM Workstation, its not free but will allow you to install your own Linux distros on your Windows PC.

I have upgraded to Feisty on the used laptop I bought. I started with Edgy a few months ago. My only issue was burning a CD with no MD5 errors. Every single one had a single error on the same file. I gave up and loaded from it anyway and it worked fine.

My only real issue was with restricted drivers. The installation loaded an NVIDIA driver, but did not activate it. This gave me crappy performance on games until I went to the Restricted Drivers option and turned it on.

Definitely download the graphical NDIS wrapper utility if you are going to install a WI-FI card. It makes the process much easier.

Linux runs very well on an old laptop that would probably choke on XP and run screaming from Vista.

Favorite Linux Game: Angry Drunken Dwarves
Favorite Linux Educational program: Celesitia astronomy (also available for Windows)

I suggest you also give PCLINUX 2007 a try, it has been outdoing Ubuntu lately.

PCLinuxOS is an English only live CD initially based on Mandrake Linux that runs entirely from a bootable CD. Data on the CD is decompressed on the fly, allowing up to 2GB of programs on one CD including a complete X server, KDE desktop, OpenOffice.org and many more applications all ready to use. In addition to the live CD, you can also install PCLinuxOS to your hard drive with an easy-to-use livecd-installer. Additional applications can be added or removed from your hard drive using a friendly apt-get front end via Synaptic.

More info here:

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pclinuxos

You might also want to check out DesktopBSD or PCBSD.