Gentles,
I am seriously thinkign of converting my syetem to Linux but theer are some complcoiating factros, including a DVD burner that would require drviers and software and a whole lot of data that would need to be transferred or backed up. I wish i had the monye to hire a professional to take care of all the details.
Any suggestions as to how I should ahndlt this? I am stick and tired of dealing with Windows' idiosyncracities 9is that even a WORD?) and need some help to find some sort of sanity.
Michael Hopcroft
Michael,
I wish I could say "I feel your pain", but I don't. <no offense intended, none taken>
Seriously, I wonder what experience do you have with Linux so far? If you have a second computer that you can use as a "sandbox", you could try some of the more popular distros. I think you will be pleasantly surprised that a lot of the functionality you desire (burning CDs and DVDs) is built in, and available as soon as you complete the install.
My experience is with distros such as Mandrake 10.x and SUSE 9.x. Both of these use the KDE window manager by default. And, along with the KDE environment, you get an excellent cd/dvd burning app called "k3b", which is a graphical fornt-end for a command line app "cdrecord".
The look and feel ( and more important, the performance ) of "k3b" is as good as (many think better than) the performance of a Windows app such as EasyCD/DVD Creator from Roxio.
Initially, data transfer is probably NOT going to be a major obstacle. If you dual boot Windows and Linux, Linux can mount your Windows partitions. FAT32 partitions are fully readable and WRITEABLE in LInux. NTFS partitions are accessible as Read Only, which should be sufficient during your initial attempt to abandon Windows.
If you can attend one of our regular meetings, any of our members will gladly give you pointers in a one-to-one setting if you so desire.
Some of our leaders are professional Linux consultants, and I suppose, if you desire extensive follow-up handholding; someone such as Matt, Dylan, or <fill in the blanks here, you know I should mention a few others here> could give you a free initial consultation.
Rodney
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