Apparently you haven't investigated Linux to any real extent. Google for Konppix and get their ISO image. It will run from the cd and can be installed to your hard disk. Forget wine and windows emulation, look at open office for your word processor and spread sheet. There are applications that will build .pdf files and most other stuff in the Linux distributions, you just have to look for them. Jim Isbell wrote:

On Sat, 2004-10-16 at 19:29 -0500, Jim Isbell wrote: Have a look at: http://appdb.winehq.org/appbrowse.php I've just started using Wine recently for running Paint Shop Pro under (it was the only thing left for which there wasn't a viable Linux alternative) and I'm *really* impressed. It was easy to get going and the speed feels about 90% of native Windows, which isn't half bad. I believe Photoshop runs happily; I'm not sure about the others (Netscape you can just run under Linux surely, or use a different browser?) Why pay money for something you can download (legally! :-) for free? Then either install to your second machine, or install to a seperate hard disk in your main machine to try it out (as you're a new Linux user, just take your disk with Windows on it out just to make sure you don't accidentally overwrite anything) Red Hat (Fedora) is reckoned to be pretty good for people new to Linux. Most distributions support installing over the web if you don't fancy downloading a local copy. Do some reading from http://www.tldp.org/ for useful 'how to use Linux' info. Also http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major compares some of the major distributions. Note that Wine will run on any Linux distribution (I use Slackware here, but I wouldn't recommend it for someone used to Windows as nearly all of the configuration is command line) cheers Jules

There's a non-Linux question at the bottom, to keep everyone reading and to at least *pretend* to be on-topic... Jim Isbell wrote: I'm trying to go the other way - there are a few things I need to run under Windows that don't work in Linux. I've never really used Windows, except recently at work, and I know next-to-nothing about it. Depends what you want to do. There are many, many ways to create PDFs in Linux (and indeed *any* of the free Unix-a-likes). Most programs expect to be able to print stuff to a PostScript printer, and from there it's a fairly trivial matter to convert to PDF. For most applications Gimp, though not really as good as Photoshop, is good enough for most applications. My girlfriend uses it exclusively for photo-editing, and she works in a large photo-processing environment. Apparently it beats the proprietary software that is specifically designed for their printer on all fronts. Netscape is just Netscape, there have always been Linux versions. Mozilla has kind of replaced it by now. If you're not using Mozilla Firefox as your web browser (especially in Windows), then you'd better have a good reason why. Easy Office I've never heard of. If you use a lot of macros, I would expect you'd need to re-write these. Open Office is more MS Office compatible than MS Office - it will open stuff that doesn't work between different MS Office versions (even the notorious Office 97). As I said, Netscape originated as a Unix browser, so you shouldn't have a problem there. At the very worst, you can use an IMAP mail server, copy your mail across, then copy it back into a different environment. I've done this to get around proprietary mailbox formats before, and it works (but it's not pretty). Most distributions of Linux come with a ton of applications, and you can always download more. Commercial software in Linux tends to be restricted to highly specialised servers and games, so don't worry about paying for stuff. Open Office is actually a little bit too "full featured" for my tastes. Gimp does pretty near everything you want in photo processing. It doesn't support CMYK separation, so print is going to be less than ideal. If you're not using four-plate litho, you needn't worry. Download one of the many thousands of free distributions of Linux and try that, then. Someone else suggested Knoppix - this is good, because its hardware detection works wonderfully. It runs from the CD, which means you need quite a lot of RAM, and even then a lot of apps are slow to start up. Bear in mind that you are looking at a woefully slow version of Linux, with all possible goodies turned on. You can turn off a lot of stuff that you don't need - one of my desktop machines is a P200MMX running Linux, and it's considerably faster than the P3-500 running Windows 2000 at work. Now for the on-list-topic but irrelevant to this discussion question! I'll post this as a separate question too, so it doesn't screw up threaded mail readers. On the PDP8/S, when you look at the serial registers (for AC, say), do they act as shift registers, bumping the number through one flip-flop at a time (so a 1 that starts in AC0 will eventually be shunted through to AC11), or are all the flip-flop inputs wired together, so the serial data gets gated into each bit in turn? Gordon.