Taking the plunge

[J. Mike Needham]

Greetings group:

I would love to make a meeting (like Nov. 5) but my current job works 
nights which makes this an impossibility :-(  Therefore, I have to ask 
my questions in the forum and hope someone has had the experience.

I am running a Compaq Presario 6470NX which is a Pentium 4 2.66 GHZ with 
512 mb RAM and 120 GB Hard disk.   It is a standard Intel motherboard 
with the 845G chipset.

Here is the complications:

It has a DVD +RW and I am running an HP Deskjet 3820 USB printer, both 
of which I need to run under Linux.  The HP has some windows centric 
drivers and I am not sure you can even address it from old DOS.  HP of 
course doesn't support Linux in this model.   To further complicate 
matters, I have an ATI 9800 Radeon Pro All-in-Wonder (TV tuner, USB 
remote control, video capture) video card.  ATI's website says that 
there are programs out there that support *some* of the function of 
their card... would need a guiding hand as I am still a novice in Linux 
world.  

Lastly... the hold applications:  I have replaced Office with Open 
Office, IE with Mozilla Firebird and my mail client is now Mozilla 
Thunderbird, I am waiting for Open Office to write an e-mail 
application.   These programs are of course, available under Linux 
too... I have PC games I want to run also... I know there are emulators 
like Wine, but really want very good performance out of them.  The games 
are:  The Sims, Thief, Thief 2 (and 3 when released) .  I am also very 
fond of iTunes having come from the Macintosh side, but they have yet to 
release a Linux version, they just now released a Windows version and I 
believe I have written Apple to see if they will do a Linux version 
(shouldn't be too hard since the iTunes for OS X is actually a FreeBSD 
application with a pretty face). 

I apologize for this lengthy post!  I wanted to maximize the information 
so that you guys might be able to help me to make the plunge.  I am FED 
UP with MS and at the same time sometimes stuck in the middle.  I 
suppose I could do a dual boot as one option between like 98 SE and 
Linux for the games... though that is not at all ideal for me. 

The plan is to use GenToo for the distrobution.  I like Gnome over KDE 
and that may be important for those who may have some ideas for me.

Thanks in advance for all your help and if someone would be willing, I 
would really like to have someone handy on the day I decide to make the 
move, we can discuss that off-list though.

Thanks again and hope someone has a lot of good advice for me.

Oh, as an after thought, my monitor is a Veiwsonic VE155b LCD with a 
native resolution of 1024 x 768.

the sound card is built into the motherboard and I believe is a standard 
AC-97 Audio controller (common on most new computers).   Please specify 
if you need more info on my config.

Thanks...

Really done now :-)

-- 
J. Mike Needham
jmneedham at kc.rr.com
Shawnee, Kansas USA