COMPUTER LINUX REFERENCE LINKS

LINUX
If you wish to get away from that other operating system, Linux is an alternative, although many options may confuse you. There are two ways in which programs are delivered, as debs or rpms - debs are for versions of Linux related to Debian, such as Knoppix and Ubuntu, rpms are associated with Red Hat. Opensuse uses rpms. My preference was for rpms. If the first Linux variant you get your hands on is a stinker for you, there may be another better suited and easier to use.

There are two major desk top environments- KDE and Gnome- each has their fans, It is not such a major choice as most distributions support both. Each has its own suite of programs, but if you choose KDE you can still run almost all Gnome programs and vice versa.

Using most Linux distributions:-
you can safely write to any FAT or Linux partitions- writing to NTFS partitions may be hazardous.
I have loaded Word documents using OpenOffice, and played Windows 3.1 games - using WINE which allows you to use SOME Windows programs. Most of my old DOS games (including several pinballs) run very well using dosbox.

Personal finance? kmymoney or Gnucash (NOTE: gnucash was broken in the Opensuse 12.1 release and you must use the 12.1 Update version which uses Updates for slib and guile). .
Genealogy? Gramps. CD and DVD burning? k3b. LP to CD? Audacity and GWC. Multimedia? Smplayer and audacious will play more than most applications in another operating system. Text to Speech? Festival. Word documents? LibreOffice (replaces OpenOffice).
OCR? It has to be Tesseract which has a separate gui called yagf. This is being developed by Google (who have an interest in book scanning). Harking back to my Basic programming days, I now use the excellent sdlBasic - also available for W32. I am using the 2007 rpm on openSuse with no problems. Some of my sdlbasic programs.

I do a lot of image processing and the GIMP meets most of my needs. For colour adjustment showfoto is excellent. I also find myself using the Windows program Irfanview quite a lot for viewing, and as the most easily used means in Linux to modify and view image metadata-

Although Irfanview is written for Windows, I was surprised to find many parts of Irfanview work fine in Linux using Wine - there may obviously be problems with files that use external viewers which are less receptive to Wine. I have found quite a number of 8BF filter files to add to the many image changes Irfanview can make and even the new OCR works.

A lot of folk are coming here looking for Linux/MAME- well, my preferred Linux solution is GXMame as a front end to xmame - these use the standard mame rom zips. My xmame is in two packages- xmame-base and xmame-SDL, and my xmame and gxmame are Mandriva plf builds, which I use in opensuse with no difficulty. Note that Linux versions of MAME just use the usual game ROM ZIP files. The sites offering ROM files for Mame tend to change a great deal- I can only suggest searching! Many users will much prefer the output from Mame before version .107, graphics changes were made which are not nice.

Linux also has software which lets you play those old Infocom text adventures (frotz or xzip).