Ok, My wife and i were recently talking about the other computer I mentioned in an earlier post. It's an older model Dell, Optiplex GXA desktop. It's got a removable, 4 (!) gig hardrive. Yes, a whoping four gigs. Amazing how far technology has come eh? Any way. She suggested I take XP, witch is slugish, huge, and esentially another load of Microsoft crap and ditch it in favor for Linux. Being that im not a complete idiot, I know my way around a computer, somewhat. After some research and heavy googlelin, I have the basic Linux facts to look at. It is basicly an Open source UNIX OS... UNIX is free, Openly distributed to the public, modifiable, and from what i hear- a great OS in general. Now, like good ole me, Im gonna ask a couple questions... Once again, i ask a lot of stupid questions, So slap me when i go to far.

How big is the basic UNIX proggy? Remeber a whole four gigs here.

If i were to say... download UNIX, Burn it to a disk, Then try to Boot this other computer from it, Would it work? Would it give the option to completely wipe out the remaining Windoze partitons? Kind of like the process you go through when you reformat windows. Is it a FAT 32 or what?


Is it extremely difficult to understand the operations? It may seem like a sterotype, But my wife sees UNIX as the type of thing only a "l33t hax0r" (in her exact words) would understand...


Is it compatible to network with another computer running XP?

In general, I guess I am asking if you think it's a good idea or not. I have among other things, found this forum extremely helpfull. I guess you guys would be the only one i would really respect if you were to say it IS possible for a comptard to install linux.

well.....you would probly need at least the full 4 gigs for most linux distros, unless of course you install a small distro such as peanut or damn small linux.

you would need to reformat the hard drive, the best i have found is ext3. don't worry, most new distros walk you thru this pretty easy, with some you can even select to let them do the partitioning. using linux in xwindows (KDE or Gnome) is basically as easy as windows.

Yes you can network (i assume you are talking about sharing files?) between windows and linux, you would use "Samba" for that.

I would say probly the easiest distro for you would be ubuntu, which can be found at http://www.ubuntulinux.org and you can also check out http://distrowatch.com

hope this helps some. i have been running linux for over 9 years now and love it.

Cool. I guess I am just a little scared about reformating when no windows reinstall CD is present. But bygod, I'm gonna do my part in sticking it to tha' man brother ! I hope it works...