[entwisi]

Originally Posted by jambutty

Booting from the CD takes forever and a couple of days but once Linux was up I felt right at home. It has an Amiga ‘feel’ about it in that there were drop down menus to access the various programmes and the desktop was almost empty. I like that!

Mmm, my laptop will boot from a live CD to a working system in ~4-5 mins tops? was it longer than that?

Originally Posted by jambutty

It is difficult to assess Linux running from a CD because a CD drive is nowhere near as fast as a hard drive and of course I couldn’t access the Internet, nor my secondary hard drive.

How do you connect to the net then? I've used ubuntu, Knoppix and Gentoo live Cds over the last couple of months and each time they have automagically setup my wifi card with no problems whatsoever. and access to your second hard disk is built in, you just need to mount it (usually by double clicking the device icon on the desktop)

Originally Posted by jambutty

The other problem would be with PageStream, a DTP programme, Audio Cleaning Lab and one or two other programmes that I use. There isn’t a version that runs on Linux. Being a different OS to Windows it obviously would not be affected by the hundreds of thousands of ‘nasties’ that can infect the normal PC, which is a plus.

Pagestream is available for Linux and there is Scibus which is well respected, Audio cleaning lab can be replaced by Gnome Wave Cleaner. You need to get past teh idea of "I want this windows program" and more " I need to do this, what softawre will do it for me"

Linux isn't windows (and thankfully never will be)

Originally Posted by jambutty

I suppose that I could allocate a spare partition to use to boot up on Linux but in all honesty it would be a bit of a waste of hard drive space.

It was an interesting experiment and worth all the hassle because it brought to my attention that my CD/DVD re-writer was dicky when burning a DVD.

I actually thought that as an ex Amiga user you would fall into it quite well, ah well, never mind