On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 9:35 AM, greg wm <tclug1 at greatlakedata.com> wrote: > a friend of mine said last night his music files won't play anymore since he > recently ran vista's upgrade, and he asked me if that might mean some > updated vista software is now deciding that some of his music is illegit. i > couldn't answer that. (can you?) but i did suggest it might be time for > him to give linux a try. now this man is smart (a macalester > valedictorian), and carefully chooses where to spend his precious time (for > $ he drives a bus parttime, contributes major energy to Boys to Men). my > experience is almost entirely centos/rhel/ubuntu, nevertheless i recommended > linux mint. (what would you have recommended?) he said his machine has > 850mb ram. i said that's probably powerful enough to either run linux > inside windows or vice versa (my relevant experience is merely kvm under > rhel, ought i have recommended virtualbox or something else?), but of course > there's always dual boot, and not strictly any need to repartition (eg with > wubi). now just in case he actually shows any further interest, may i ask, > what corrections or recommendations do you suggest? I would recommend LXDE Linux mint - very lightweight, and from my experience does everything a "heavier" variant would do. I'd suggest dual-boot for that kind of machine - virtual XP under mint will be too slow. Also - form a "converting" stand point - I found out that my friends, which I set to dual-boot usually adopt linux much faster, as it's much of a hassle to reboot each time. On the other hend, VM solution makes people more confident that they don't loose anything ... still, while the VM users feel safer and happier, the dual-booters advance faster in the linux world :) Cheers, -- Svetoslav Milenov (Sunny) Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.