hey guys, i know that this is going to sound pretty stupid but i got many different versions of windows here: win95,win98se,win2k pro,winnt4 workstation,winxp home, win xp pro, and franqly im quite sick of windows and im thinknig of switching to linux, and i have done a lot of reading and ive tried redhat 6.1, redhat 7.1, suse 9.1 and now im thinking of trying the one that used to be called Corel Linux cuz my neighbor has the original 2nd edition cdrom's and he is offering to give me a copy but i know it's pretty extinct!!!! ive tried it once before and i like the look and feel of it for some reason and i like the networking capabilities (i got a network and cant get any other distro to work with my network!) anyways i was wondering if anyone would recommend using corel or nt because as stated above i had a good time until i finally decided i wanted the full version! these are my specs: p3 533Mhz (slot 1) 256Mb SDRAM (pc100) 2 gig hdd :( gotta get a new one soemtime soon! and im using redhat 6.1 now for now until i can get corel! if this isnt a good choice is their any other distro like it and easy to use (that will fit as a server and kde/gnome on 2 gigs?) thx a million guys!!!! Thx in advance!!! p3 533B mhz slot-1 192MB pc100 10GB hdd win xp pro

Dude, I'm no linux guru (nor buff, nor tech, nor even n00b really, that's how inexperienced with linux I am). But even I can tell you that Linux is most definitely not dead. As a matter of fact, its bigger than ever and growing by the day (then again, this feeling could be the result of my being a handsome young comp sci student preparing to take over the world). I've been looking into what flavor I should run on a networked media pc I have in the works. Right now, its looking like its gonna be Debian based (likely a derivative), maybe ubuntu. I'm trying the live cd version of that for now, but I've not messed around with networking or even actual media playing on it yet. the thing is, there are all kinds of thing out there. Oh, and just to let you know, my media pc is gonna be a PIII 733, 256 megs of ram, a geforce 5200, SB live. I'm gonna get a standard NIC for it so I don't expect any network problems really. Thing is, I'm gonna put a 200 gigger in mine, but seeing as the live cd runs quite well, is quite full-featured, and is only on a 700 meg disc, you should have no prob. Also, with your linux experience, you should know about such things as Damn Small Linux and such. I mean how much does that distro take up...a whole 50 megs or something? Hate has a way of closing the eyes, the ears, and the hearts of men.

Corel Linux is defunct. You can use older distributions, of course, but when they are no longer supported things can get hairy. Documentation, while common, is not too good about supporting lots of different versions. Were I in your place, I would, as the previous poster mentioned, look at Ubuntu. Linux is excellent for low-end systems. KDE 3.2, for example, will run okay on a 300Mhz P2 with ~200MB RAM. It does depend on what you're running though.