Hey, I have a few Linux ISO's saved to a folder in Windows, ready to get burned to a CD. I have Slackware 8, Redhat 7.3, KNOPPIX, Vector, and BBC Linux. I use to have a little network in my house consisting of 4 computers. Now I am down to one PC and an old pentium 2 laptop. I told my mother, of whome I still live with unfortunatly, that I want to switch over to Linux. I would be able to switch to linux with her permission, however she wants to keep America Online. Is there a distro that will support AOL? I heard WINE with AOL 5 works with Mandrake but I am not sure. Also, for my laptop, would would be a good distro to go on a pentium 2 300mhz , 128 edo ram, 4 gig hd laptop? Im kind of liking the way Linux gentoo looks on the screenshot websites. I like nice GUIs by the way. Thanks alot guys. - Chris

In a sentence, duel boot..trust me your mom will like still having access to windows...and you get the freedom of linux. If your HD is at least 40 gigabytes, then you got a ton of room.

Yeah, I agree. Dual-booting is the way to go. If, as I suspect with a PIII-300, you don't have a particularly large hard drive then buying something larger and installing it as a second drive (leave your mum's windows where it is!) would be a good investment. One thing, though. Whilst Linux can access FAT32 drives (ie. as used by Windows 98 etc.) Windows can't generally access Linux drives. Therefore, if (for example) you bought a new 40GB drive I'd recommend setting up at least some of it to be FAT so that you can use it for Linux and your mum can also use the same space when downloading using AOL etc. As for look and feel most distros are pretty much the same, as they all tend to use the same front-end, KDE and/or Gnome. There is a distro called Lycoris (http://www.lycoris.com) which has been designed to have a Windows "look and feel" which is quite a good intro to Linux for those who know their way around Windows... one word of warning, though, if you do go for this distro make sure you buy the version with the source!! The basic 1-CD edition has nothing but a desktop... no 'c' compiler, no Apache, no nothing! You can download these from the web later, but if you don't have a fast connection it'll take time ;-) Sean