Email Warning

[cabinetman]

http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/obamaspeech.asp
.

[crokett]

This kind of message is the reason I am moving my work machine (and eventually home machine) to Linux.

[lebomike]

Crocket, Not being a computer geek, how do you switch to linux?

Thanks
Mike

[Alex Franke]

Thanks for the heads up, c-man! With all the buzz about the inauguration I can see how people might forget that some of the seemingly-related emails are really evil...

Crocket, Not being a computer geek, how do you swith to Linux?

Download Ubuntu. It's free.

[Ed62]

Thanks for the info. I can see a ton of people opening that up.

Ed

[crokett]

Crocket, Not being a computer geek, how do you switch to linux?

Thanks
Mike

Well as Alex said, you start by downloading and installing a distribution. there are several. Fedora is the free version of Red Hat, there is SUSE, Debian and Slackware to name a few. Ubuntu is what I have. It is the most user-friendly of the distros and I've tried em all at one time or another. It was built to be user-friendly. The install is pretty painless and it supports a lot of what Windows does - 1-click updates, etc. There is good info at www.ubuntu.com and www.ubuntuforums.org If you download the Ubuntu CD you can boot a fully functional version and try it out without installing it. You can also download a virtual machine and install that on Windows, then install Linux inside of that.

The trick is to find replacement apps for your Windows stuff. Some exist and are better than Windows counterparts. Some don't (like most games) in which case you have to either dual boot with Windows or run an emulator. At work I have an emulator running Windows inside Linux for 2 critical apps I need. The emulator takes a chunk of your RAM while it is though. The other option for Windows apps in Linux is something called Wine. It takes less resources than a full-on emulator but also takes a fair bit of work to get an app running, and you need to configure each app separately. With an emulator you have Windows installed, so you can just install several apps under the same virtual machine. The other thing is hardware - your computer itself as well as printers, etc.

At work I am making the switch because I am tired of getting updates from MS and corporate to download the latest hotfix with mandatory reboot that generally happens in the middle of my workday.

[master53yoda]

For us Micro-soft operating system users I found that shifting to firfox for my web browser got rid of 90% of the garbage problems I also run norton anti virus and once every couple months ad-aware. before I shifted to firefox I had problems with stuff all the time and HAD to run the ad-aware at lest once per week. I did not like vista when I first started using it but after a years worth of MS updates I don't have any problems anymore.
One thing that Vista does do is use USB scan drives are used as ram as well and that eliminated me from needing to upgrade beyond the 2 meg i have in the machine. If I have a slower program running I just put in my 2 gig USB scan disk and the problem is gone.