Hello All, At the beginning of the year I decided to brute-force-convert from Windows to Linux, bought Red Hat 8.0 and started coming to meetings and reading the postings. After demoralizing experiences which culminated in using a Sportster modem on my Dell Inspiron 7500 which trashed the system, I realized that powers greater that I did not want me to do Linux. But a few months have gone by and I get skin rashes when thinking of the attitudes Microsoft is imposing on software all the way to almost criminal things about leaving hidden files in computers such as is done with Turbotax 2003. To make a long story short, I am going to try again, with Red Hat 8.0, this time in a totally dedicated New Dell notebook which is supposed to have a hardware modem. Dell recently made sounds about coming out with Linux support, but some distractor has taken them from this glorious purpose. I still think Linux can run on a Dell. (Their support, including replacing a recently trashed hard drive has been very good.) When I eavesdrop on all you tcluggers, I realize that although help is there for newbies, the flavor is as a very technical software challenge which I am not interested in. If there are any other newbies who would like to get together to grow into Linux, possibly with a mother hen expert from you luggers, we might be able to create a methodology for making Linux relatively painless to understand and implement. I do expect to get stumped and still cry for help to all you luggers. Without your presence chances for success would be small as Linux is not yet plug and play, boot and shoot or run with fun. Although you all may want to reply with anecdotes, wild laughter, black forbodings, or whatever, I won't be ready with my system for a couple of weeks, but want to see if there are any newbies who might want to consider what we might do to conquer this challenge. Donald Georgi DonaldKGeorgi at aol.com _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list