I have no experience with RL. At first I thought it might be an other joke takeoff, like Microsoft Linux. But after going to their web site, it appears to be on the up and up.

One thing that make Linux so attractive to the people who have spent the time to get the Linux boxes going, is that they are generally in complee control of their system.

The down side is that Linux, in any of its forms, has a steep learning curve. There are, however, distros that claim easier installions, for the newbie, than others. Again, I don't know anything about RL, but I have heard glowing praises for Mandrake. But then again, every distro has it's share of pundants. But at the heart of Linux is it's kernel, which is standard on all distros.

You should have no problem with you hardware being detected correctly. But, to be able to do everything you've described, I think 600 mb of hard drive may be a little slight. I would really recommend that you have at least 3 gb of disk for you Linux install.

Speaking of disks, Linux creates it's own partitions and formats them upon install. So if you have any partitions on the disk you're going to be using, run MS fdisk and remove any DOS or WIN9x partition to gain the amount of free disk space you think you'll need.

Although you can mount any WIN9X partition in Linux and share files, keep in mind that Linux cannot run MS Windows applications. But there are Linux equivilent packages that you would use in MS Windows. As an example, Star Office is Linux's package that duplicates Microsoft Office. Free. There isn't a MS IE for Linux, for obvious reasons, but there is Netscape, Mozilla and others for web browsing. Free. Yow have a choice of desktop windowing in Gnome, KDE and others, each having it's own distinct character. Allowing you to have either/or on your system. Free.

Until you have everything up and running, you will need to resort to windows to come back here for answers, if needed. And if you need help, no matter the distro, there is a great bunch of people here, that are always willing to help.

I don't know if I answered any of your questions, the way you wanted, but I hope I helped a bit. If I didn't answer some specific question, I'm sure someone else will be more than happy to fill in any gaps I may have left. Good Luck, and welcome to the Linux community. -mk



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If it ain't broke, fix it till it is.