I am glad for you Linuxisbetter (a different thread) because I have been battling with Linux for months and I am no closer to success that I was when I started. I have Mandrake 9, RedHat 7, and Lycoris and the only one I have had any sort of success with is Mandrake. I find that I never have the right permissions and no matter what I do I can never achieve ownership of anything. One OS will recognise my printer and the other won't. One will let me format a floppy and the other won't. One will let me look at the contents of a CD and the other won't. I can get a CD burn programme to work on one and yet the identical programme will not work on the other. Conversely it will work on the third but I don't have any ownership and it won't let me do anything. I have clicked on install programmes and watched my drive light flickering like mad and I can never find the programme. I have no idea where it has gone or it tells me that some other file is needed first. A meaningless name and I have no idea where to find it. I am perfectly familiar with DOS but I am afraid the syntax and tree construction in Linux has me tossed. The help from this forum and others is fantastic but more often than not the helper assumes that poster has some modicum of knowledge and most times the help provided is useless because it can't be applied. It may be a fantastic system but until it is as easy to use and understand I'll continue to use Windows... but I haven't given up yet

You're not alone. After trying multi-boots w/Windows (failures) I decided to get VirtualPC (VMware is another). Let's you use Linux in an "emulated" form. No sweat. If you can get your hands on it, it's the bomb. Learn one at a time & learn it well. Mandrake seems great to me (Lycoris & Redhat8, too). When you run it this way, there's no risk- just learning. T

Hello, The first thing is to agree you where you say that many of the asnwers on support forums are too technical. For the future I´ll try to explain my answers a bit more. Are you sure that windows is easier? I think that is just a knowledge and routine question. What happens when Windows comes with the blue screen? What about the viruses and the problems devired from them? And the money it costs? Some example questions: Where do you tell your system the name of a non-windows machine so you can telnet it, ping it,...it? How do you add a route if you have more network paths than the default gateway?... The answer is: you must learn everything you want to do on every operating system. The only thing is that most of us have been using different versions of windows for many years and that experience is very important. These days the X window environment and all the graphic tools available are comparable or better than windows´ graphical user interface (and easy to use too). I have many friends that don´t know anything about computers that have installed Mandrake Linux and work perfectly with it without any kind of experience (sometimes with the help of the google search). I work with both OS (apart of Solaris) and maybe for the easy things windows is easier, but once you need more deep, it becomes very much harder than Linux. And of course when you have some trouble, usually is more difficult to correct it with Windows than with Linux. Some time ago (maybe 2 years ago or earlier) the task of installing, configuring,... Linux was something difficult, but now there´s no excuse at this point. The conclusion (like in every point in this life) is that you´ll have to do an effort in learning new things, but if these things are good, the work is justified. As I said, I work with many operating systems and I have Red Hat, Debian, Solaris x86, Win98 and Win2K on my PC. I use all of them ocasionally, but I "work" every day with Linux because it´s the best of them for me (This is in my home. At work "I´m forced" to use Solaris for Sparc at 80%). Linux Multiboot is quite simple with new distribution installation processes and is very well documented on the net, so I think that this is the best choice. Emulation will bore you because it slows the work, so it will become into another favourable point for Windows. I encourage you to not desist in your Linux effort. Bye and good luck! jmiturbe

Thanks for the advice (and the sympathies) I'll just keep on going I guess! Regards