[doctorwho]

:wave:
I have been using Windows XP for the last few years and as I have become extremely dissatisfied with the amount of spyware etc., I have been considering to opt for Linspire, having read a few reviews.
As a relatively inexperience home-user, does anyone here recommend it as a first encounter with Linux?

cheers

 

[Skie]

While they appear to have done a good job putting together an easy to use distro of Linux, I would rather recommend Ubuntu, Fedora Core 6 or SUSE 10.1 (I think 10.1 is the latest).

 

[K-B]

Linspire is a good beginner's distro, I do use it as I got a free membership with them back when it first came out. The biggest downside for most people is that unlike many Linux distributions, is not free. I imagine you are aware of that by now. However, I did like it for it's slick setup, and neat look, and it is the only distro I have tried that automatically set up my wireless card. If you would like to check out free distributions, I'd recommend PCLinuxOS or Linux Mint (links in my signature). Linux Mint is based on the extremely popular Ubuntu, but is much better for beginners IMO. You can download a free Live CD of Linspire (you will need a high-speed internet connection) from here and burn it to a CD, start your computer from it and try it out without making any changes to your computer whatsoever. That way you know it will run on your computer before you buy. Just keep in mind that there are free distributions that do just as good a job.

 

[doctorwho]

compatibility

Thank you for the responses. I have tried the linspire and felt impressed with it also. I don't mind paying a little for the OS (although "free" is my favorite word), but are the other OS's mentioned dramatically better/different? Also, I heard that the CNR is a great bonus for Linspire users.

I guess what concerns me the most are the compatibility issues: I inserted a CD created on XP with documents and tried opening it. The program(?) Konqueror attempted to open it, but then abruptly stopped. How can I access all of my doc's, pic's, tunes created in XP?

As a side issue, the backup CD's that I created gave me the "non-critical error message" ("access is denied") as I was having troubles with perrmissions in XP. I was hoping that if I did a fresh install these issues would be resolved...(and that's when I considered that Linspire would be preferable). I have no interest in XP except for access documents (and using programs like Fruity Loops and Acid). I don't really want to have a dual OS setup though (I am tired of windows).
thanks

 

[doctorwho]

japanese typing?

I forgot to ask if anyone can tell me if there is a program like IME for linspire/linux that can translate english characters to Japanese. I would imagine that something like that exists, but I was hoping to have my belief confirmed.

cheers,

DW

 

[TheMatt]

Did you mount the CD? You should right click on the CD in the media folder and select mount. The little green arrow in the corner should appear when you do. Since you are using KDE, it should look similar to this pic:

I am using Kubuntu, and I think you will find that it is not too different. The user interface (UI) will mostly depend on what desktop environment you have. You are using KDE (I assumed this since you are using Konqueror). Aside from that, the other thing you will notice is stability. Linspire is a pretty stable distro, so you shouldn't have any concerns.

I think you would be best off keeping Windows for now until you have settled into Linspire or whatever distro you choose. You will be able to access all your documents on the Windows partition from Linspire, so that is not an issue. Once you have found all the programs you need and have installed them, you can just delete the Windows partition and create a new one to store documents on. There is a linux equivalent for almost every program in Windows. Just search your package manager (Adept) and sites like SourceForge.net.