Oh my god, that was the problem. When I upgraded to XFree86 4.1.0 it wrote over my old XF86Config-4 file. Thanks for the hint.

quote:Original post by DanG
I''m a novice programmer and coputer hobbiest.

I have been stuck with MS OS since all my computers i bye come with it. I would like to try Linux. However I know nothing about Linux. Does it feel about like windows? Can a program written for windows run on Linux? Is the Redhat 7 the best Linux? Do you have to know computers pretty well to use Linux? Is Linux that much better than Windows (especially XP as that is the alternative for me)?

Any response greatly appreciated.

There is a distrubtion of Linux for Macs (check out www.linux.org to find out. cause I can''t remember)

Linux is based on UNIX (which was developed by AT&T) and was written by Linus Torvalds as personal project which he opened up to the public under the GNU public license. I won''t go throught the whole histroy since it all documented on the web.

There are shells that run on top of Linux to make it more user friendly, much like explorer(the windows GUI) does on windows. I personally like one called KDE.

Programs written for Windows can not be run natively on Linux you need a Windows emulator (the common one is WINE(WINdow Emulator)). Although most distribution of linux will let you see the contents of a Windows partition and access data on that partition.

As for "Is Linux better than Windows?" It depends on who you ask and is normally based on personal experiance. For my money YES!
If you install Linux you don''t have to get ride of Windows. You can use a boot loader like GRUB to multi boot the system. I would recommend Linux-Mandrake (www.linux-mandrake.com) for beginners. It easy to install and it will automaticly install a bootloader or install inside a Windows partion. I can''t really comment on other dirstributions.

One more thing if you do install Linux and want to keep Windows install Windows first.

quote:Original post by DanG
I''m a novice programmer and coputer hobbiest.

I have been stuck with MS OS since all my computers i bye come with it. I would like to try Linux. However I know nothing about Linux. Does it feel about like windows? Can a program written for windows run on Linux? Is the Redhat 7 the best Linux? Do you have to know computers pretty well to use Linux? Is Linux that much better than Windows (especially XP as that is the alternative for me)?

Any response greatly appreciated.

Search www.google.com for The Linux Documentation Project or goto www.linuxnewbie.com for tutorials and information so you can make an informed choice and see what your getting into.

quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
There is a distrubtion of Linux for Macs (check out www.linux.org to find out. cause I can''t remember)

Actually, there''s at least two: LinuxPPC (or the commercial site) and YellowDog Linux.

Actually WINE stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator"
(one of quite a few recursive algorithms You''ll find along the way :-))
WINE is actually an clone of the Win32 API which allows Windows apps to work natively in various Intel based Unixes(Unicies?) without the overhead of an emulator. Transgaming is releasing a closed port that runs many DirectX games (Mandrake 8.1 GamerEdition is shipping Nov 9th with The Sims :-) )

check out http://www.winehq.org, http://www.transgaming.com and http://www.linux-mandrake.com for more details

There are also full emulators which allow you to run a normal copy of windows without having to dual boot. The three that come immediately to mind are VMware, Win4Lin and Plex86; the first two are commercial products and the later is Open.

VMWare: http://www.vmware.com : Allows you to run nearly any x86 OS in a Virtual machine but is SLOWWWWWW unless you have fast hardware.

Win4Lin: http://www.netraverse.com : Similar but only allows you to run Win9x and requires a proprietary kernel patch, faster though.

Plex86: http://www.plex86.org : Open source alternative, still quite young not really usable yet

All of these also suffer from less than full hardware support in the VM.

HTH