SoulSe

I don't completely agree. Yes, gaming is perhaps the last hill to climb. But we're almost at the top. I play Half Life 2, World of Warcraft, KOTOR2, etc. all on Linux. It wasn't even challenging to get them to work (except for WoW which I had to use a hack on the Transgaming config file to get working properly). Those are three of the top games being played at the moment. Besides for that, I play Doom 3, Unreal Tournament and Neverwinter Nights natively, because some games companies already do port their wares to Linux. Gaming is not nearly an issue for me. And I'm not a linux guru by the furtherest stretch. Anybody can install cedega and out of the five games I currently play with it, only one required anything special. Microsoft can't apply the control you speak of - it's like trying to pick up water.

As for which distro to toast, I'd go with SuSe... never liked it.

This is a discussion for a seperate thread. Please start one or PM me and I'll split your post off.

I use Abiword, prefer it to Oo. It's lighter, slicker and not half as ugly :P I'm using the latest version now and I do notice improvements with every release. That said, I just write on it - no tables, etc. So perhaps fancy formatting gives problems with .doc, but for the basic stuff I can confirm that it works better than just ok.

I play it in Cedega with no problems. And the mouse cursor issue is best resolved by adding this to your Transgaming config file (/home/user/.transgaming/config or /home/user/.point2play/config): ;; World of Warcraft [AppDefaults\\WoW.exe\\memory] "MemoryLayoutOverride" = "0x10000000" Using that entry you can play with Direct Draw or OpenGL. I play with all the settings on full with my FX5700 Ultra. I haven't enabled Antrostropic filtering though, so I can't comment on that.

Manpower is stronger than money. Linux has a few hundred thousand developers working on it as opposed to the hundred or whatever over at Microshaft. This discussion has been had. The future of software in open, the only questions are when and who. And once the dust has settled, the game developers, like all other proprietary vendours, will be faced with an adapt-or-die scenario.

I was also going to suggest updating / installing the latest SDL libs. If you're using KDE, try disabling the KDE sound server (it's in the KDE control panel, sorry - not at my box now and can't remember what it's called).

Well, obviously everybody is going to suggest their favourite distro to you, so I'm going to go ahead and reccommend Gentoo. Gentoo is lightweight, offers an awesome learning curve and the Gentoo kernel (if you choose to use it) has some cool stuff in it for laptops. If you want something easier to install, go Ubuntu. It's the best "friendly" distro out there IMHO.

hmmm... never heard that one before, I'd also like some supporting links. I have a Microsoft mouse and keyboard because I got them for 'free' as part of some lame OEM deal when I bought my last computer. To be honest though, the mouse is argubly the best I've ever owned and the keyboard is really nice. *shrug* You won't catch me using their OS though (got World of Warcraft running super-smooth in Linux with Cedega this weekend. yay!)

Well I got that right with a bluetooth dongle, multisync, synce and my ipaq - with your help if I remember correctly... Anyway, it worked, but not very well. And you could sync it with something like Gnome's PIM suite just as easily if memory serves me correctly. It breaks my heart to see what Evolution has become. I used to love it.

You forgot Knights Of The Old Republic 2 - that's one of the best RPGs I've ever played and I know you love it too.

I used to use Evolution until Novell bought Ximbian and b0rked it up. Now I use Thunderbird on my box and, of course, Mail on my iBook.

I voted shoot 'em up, cus my favourite games are moslty FPS, although I enjoy RPGs/MMORPGs as well.

I'd reccommend a vanilla kernel. Easy to set up and, imho, far superior to the patched affair you'll get from Mandriva. http://www.kernel.org/ Go pristine, it's the only way to roll.

As has been said by arctic and others - there is nothing wrong here. Linux is simply using your machine to its maximum capability. Isn't that what you want your operating system to do? It's also balancing your RAM content much more effeciently than Windows, so not only will your performance be good, it'll be better.

Good to know - thanks fissy

AFAIK you can connect on 5223 as well, that's what ichat used. Hmmm... I wonder if the 5222 port is only for text (because that's what they tell you to use with Gaim) and 5223 is for AV ('cus they tell you to use that for iChat)?

There are also stores that sell Linux keys that you can replace your Windows keys with. I think Think Geek has a range of stuff...

I think Google are aiming for the voice + video primarily with their client. I haven't tried it though, since I don't have a windows partition. Question: if I use iChat AV on my iBook to connect to someone with the Google client, I'll be able to do AV, right?

vim and if you must have more; Bluefish.

I have friends going to the UK all the time, I'll just get one of them to drop it in the post, that way postage will be next to nothing. So don't worry about payment, just enjoy the DVD ;) The Go Open Source campaign is something close to my heart and part of my job - it's great to see the movement getting some attention internationally and I support it anyway I can. I also have a Go Open Source pen! Anyone? :P

I never got a reminder... hmm, I guess that means I dropped off, like, two years ago or something.

It's amazing how quickly this is spreading! Well, so far I'm impressed. Google are going to take over the world, one computer at time. Because of Google Talk, I now have gmail (never needed it before) and lots of people who just had gmail now have IM. I'm connecting to it wit AdiumX and I've also used iChat and Gaim - both seemless. This is also showcasing what an awesome transport Jabber really is and what can be achieved with it; VoIP, video... really neat. I've heard rumours of Google making a play for Skype, anyone else heard that?

Yeah, I just saw that. What's neat is that they've added voice to Jabber (or their flavour of it). Problem is, most of the third party clients won't do speech.

Also checkout Xsane - the graphical frontend to SANE. You should be able to urpmi xsane and it'll install sane as a dependancy. If your scanner isn't SANE compliant, then there are other options too.