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(I Hate Microsoft), Linux Help!

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Microsoftsuc:
Hey everyone,
    I hate microsoft just as much as everyone else.  I need to keep it on my machine unfortunately for business purposes.  But I have and would like to run linux as much as I can.  I have run Redhat 7.1 and Mandrake 8.2 with NE6 and StarOffice.  I have liked it all.  I need help finding a distribution that is friendly like Mandrake and has the ability to: Have Serious Multimedia Applications (sound and video) Already Built In,  Games (You Need Fun) and that is about it.  You can email me at [email protected].  Thank You.

iancom:
Welcome!

I know what you mean... my PC's at home are almost completely Microsoft-free except that I do have to keep a couple of them with partitions for Windows for my work (and that's pretty much all I use them for   )

In terms of games, I'm probably not the best person to comment on that, although it seems that Mandrake would be your best bet there - it has better support for native hardware OpenGL acceleration (RedHat probably can do this but I couldn't find it in the install process whereas it's definitely there in Mandrake 8.2).

For my purposes, though, I find RedHat does everything I need, and as long as you steer clear of the x.0 releases is very stable indeed. I've been using 7.3 for a few weeks now (from the 'Skipjack' beta) and it's been great - KDE 3 is a huge improvement.

I don't think you'll find any distributions (please, anyone correct me if I'm wrong!) that have the sort of out-of-the box multimedia support that you get from Windows. However, with just a little effort you can get a system that does everything you need.

I use "aviplay" for Windows-compatibility for video files. It does pretty much everything including all the DivX formats. You can also get completely multi-region DVD players. All these are fairly easy to install.

In terms of music, XMMS is just superb for MP3 playback and playlisting. I don't want to get into the whole Winamp/XMMS thing - they both have their own strengths and both do their jobs extremely well.

With a little coaxing, you can even get Musicmatch Jukebox to run on Linux, though in my experience it's a little flaky (the Linux version MusicMatch provide is not a native Linux app, but runs under WINE I think).

In terms of Office Applications, Sun have started charging for StarOffice (I don't begrudge them this of course, it's still better and cheaper than MS Office), so I now use OpenOffice - they've just released their 1.0.0 version and it's great in my opinion. Reads and writes MS-compatible files very well and includes more features (a proper vector drawing program for a start) than Office. If you need an integrated database suite you'll probably want to buy StarOffice 6 which includes the Adabas database (far better than MS Access, but not quite FoxPro as far as I can tell).

As a bonus you also get to use The Gimp - a full-featured photo editor almost (but not quite - yet) rivalling PhotoShop.

Scanners can be tricky to set up in Linux - particularly USB ones (mostly because the manufacturers blatantly ignore the fact that people want support for Linux/BSD) but "Sane" is coming along nicely and you might find your scanner (if you have one) is supported just fine.

Anyway, good luck...!

Master of Reality:
i would suggest Red Hat 7.3.
But i am having installation problems with 7.3

creedon:
Give LibraNet 2.0 a shot; it's based on Debian "Woody" (testing release).  It's MUCH easier to install than plain-vanilla Debian, but it has apt-get for packages, and it comes with a shitload of apps and window managers.  This is the second release of LibraNet I've used, and they just get better and better.

iancom:
...I have to admit that I haven't heard of that, and I haven't ever seriously tried a recent Debian release.

How does it do with multimedia out-of-the-box? One of my main gripes with most Linux distributions is their lack of a comprehensive media player. You have to dig around to find software to install before you can just double-click on a DivX movie, or insert a DVD to play it.

Is there a distro where immeditatley after installation you could double-click on a DivX avi file and have it play sucessfully?

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