The others have given you some good advice so far. The heart of it is that you'll have to kick a few tires to find a distro that works well for you. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are both working well for both new and experienced Linux users right now. May I suggest you start there? This means using the more recent hardware though. The Toshiba you mentioned can run Linux, but it's rather low on specs, so I would typically use this sort of thing as a command line only laptop, or with a light weight desktop environment - like Fluxbox. But then you are not comparing Linux to Windows properly and your opinion will be skewed (as Kevin stated).
As for dual booting, yes this is possible. But experience tells me that you should take all reasonable precautions with your data before you start changing your drive partitions. Murphey's Law is well known in the computer field :). So, make sure that you are not loosing anything if the drive has to be completely wiped. If that does happen, then you're prepared. If not, well, it was a nice day.. :) The thing about "trying" Linux is that you need to be patient and understand that Linux is NOT Windows. There will be a lot of similarities, but you can't expect to do everything "just like windows". How you do some things will be a little different than your Windows experience. That said, the modern main stream distributions (K/Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora, Mandriva, etc) do try to make life as simple as possible for the average user. Hehe - my roommate doesn't understand why people run Windows and get viruses, and he knows NOTHING about computers except for the one I put in front of him with Kubuntu on it. (He only needs basic Internet capabilities though.) As mentioned, we're here when you run into problems, or have questions. The list normally has a good response time too. You can probably get faster help here than you could by phone support for some tech call centers... :) Good luck on you Linux journey, and may you find the freedoms we all enjoy now.. :) Shawn Dan Mueller wrote: > Hello, Im new. I am currently a windows 2000 and xp user and am considering > trying out this linux system. I wanted to try it out on an old toshiba > laptop. its a 440 satalite or something like that. I believe a 33 mhz, 32 > meg ram and a 1 gig hdd. it has a 14.4 modem in it aswell and currently > loaded with win 98. is this doable or do i need to look at something else. > I also hace a pc running win 2000 which i might consider loading another > operating system on it as long as i will always have the win 2000 on it > untill im comfortable with linux. > > Any input would be appreciated. > > Dan > > > _______________________________________________ > clug-talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca > Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) > **Please remove these lines when replying _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
