A few weeks ago a question was asked about the best Linux distribution for office workstations. How about the best for a home machine? 5-6 year old HP Pavilion, PI, 433 Celeron, 12 Gig HD, 192 Meg RAM. Will share a cable connection through a router with an XP Home machine and a Win2K laptop. I have zero experience with Linux/Unix, though 6-8 years ago I was the defacto Sys Admin for a 10-12 workstation NT 3.5 system, mostly user accounts and loading and updating applications. I'm a Tech Writer by profession, and am fairly competent in Word, and can usually get reasonable results in any WinTel application I've tried.
Thanks,
Harvey

For what you are running, I would just stick to an older version of RedHat or Mandrake. Both are simple to use and dont require mega proccessors.

I'm mostly with Scott on this one.

rhat 9, or Fedora Core 1 (which many think of as rhat 10) were both good and known to be pleasant within the win32 world as well.

[I'll add a plug for my company (Specifix) at http://www.specifix.com -- the distro is technically "alpha" but will be beta shortly and actually stable now -- we use it internally on our servers/etc -- if you're adventurous... ]

kim.

You'll need to upgrade your hardware, but the best home Linux/Unix distribution is... Mac OS X. Sorry, couldn't resist.

Heh -- you forgot to mention the small hardware requirement

kim.

If you want to just try out Linux without making a commitment go download the current "Knoppix" iso and burn a bootable cd. This is a "live" cd distribution based on the superior Debian distribution of Linux. By "live" cd I mean you can boot the cd and in a few seconds you have a fully functioning Linux workstation up and running without doing any install - it all runs off the cd with no change to your hard-drive. Remove the cd and reboot and you're back to Windows again. Play around with it and decide if Linux is something you want to keep around - THEN do a hard-drive install. Do a google search to find the Knoppix site and instructions.

-Ben M. (Linux user since 1995)

Thanks guys,
As far as I know, Linux will only go on a machine for playing around with. I have to keep the main home unit and my laptop as Windows/MS Office machines for work stuff. Unless I get a client who uses Linux... Eight or ten years ago I worked on a very large project that tried to convert the finished product (15 - 20 kpages of outline formatted text and line drawing graphics) from MAC to Office, don't ever want to try that again...
Harvey