I have not tried any Linux OS yet. Someone told me Mandriva would be best. But I would like to now if windows software runs on Linux systems or do you need emulator software running (not using it for games).

I'm new at this but I ran accross and app called "wine". I didn't play with it too much but it seemed a little buggy. I tried to get MS office to load and it just didn't respond, take this with a grain of salt becuase I'm still figuring to configure the thing correclty.

I'm sure there are several experts reading this right now that can help you out with better answers.

http://www.winehq.com/

Good luck.

Thanks for replying so quick. I didn't think anyone would bother reading new messages this time of the morning.

There is no version of linux that natively runs windows .exe files, but as mentioned above, wine, cedega, and codeweavers are several of the emulators.

For the most part, there are linux programs that work as well or better than the windows programs. Office for example has Open Office, which is 100 times easier to get running than microsoft office.

Peace,
JimBass

if you have a program that absolutely needs a full blown windows installation, you can use qemu/vmware etc..

Another alternative is to use VMware and run a Windows virtual machine. But as JimBass already said, usually you can find Linux native alternatives for most programs you use under Windows. Highly specialized Windows programs and games, no, but normal work-type stuff, yes. If you can tell us specifically what Windows software you want to run, maybe someone can give you a definitive answer or suggest an alternative piece of software.

Hint: As a Windows user considering giving Linux a try, don't submarine your efforts by expecting Linux to be a Windows clone. It is not. Realize that you are learning something new. Many things will be familiar though. As I'm typing this post into my Linux Firefox web browser, it looks and operates just like a Windows Firefox browser.

[edit]Looks like kedar_damle beat me to the VMware suggestion by one minute. I guess I type too slow![/edit]

The quick answer to this is NO! Windows runs Windows software and Linux runs Linux software.
For better or worse, that is not completely true.
Compatibility and practicality have to be tried to decide.
I would definately suggest you try Mandriva and see what you think. (Dual boot, do not go Linux cold turkey.)
Good Luck.

Do you think that the UK is the only country in the world You probably posted at around 4 am, so 6 am in my timezone, 5 pm in New Zealand (how do youy mean early in the morning ). US was probably still sleeping.

That makes sense. For the record: some of us don't sleep.

Wim I apologise I thought this was a UK forum site. Don't forget this is the first time I have used this sort of site, that is why I went straight to the Newbie section. I have downloaded Kubunto but is this as good as Mandriva. Is Mandriva free or where do you buy it from. I have a dual drive dual boot setup with XP on both drives. Can you alter the boot.ini file to boot into a linux system.

Nope. You need free (unpartitioned) space on either of those drives to install to. Free doesn't mean, "I'm using 80 Gb of the 250 Gb of space on the D drive", it means, "I shrunk the D drive from 250 Gb to 150 Gb, and now have 100 Gb of unpartitioned space.

There are a million postings here about how to shrink windows partitions through linux, or using partition magic. Look it up if you haven't already.

Also, use the linux bootloader to choose wether to run linux or either copy of windows. Trying to get boot.ini to load linux is really tough, and a bass-ackwards way of doing things. Linux is very friendly to dual (or triple) booting, windows is very unfriendly towards booting anything other than windows.

Peace,
JimBass

JimBass I was going to delete XP on the secondary drive and replace it with Linux. This is why I wanted to know if it would run windows software i.e. AVG anti-virus, Spybot, Zone Alarm etc. Also can the Linux OS see windows files or is it like FAT32 not being able to see NTFS files or partitions.

Well, you really ARE a complete and total newbie. That's NOT A BAD THING. It just means that you have LOTS to learn.

Linux is not, and will hopefully never become, Windows or anything similar.

Linux can "see windows files" on both FAT and NTFS, but it can only write to FAT.

Please, tell us exactly what programs you want to use in Linux, and we'll tell you about programs that will hopefully do the same things and load the same files.

You don't need any sort of protection software - all that is built into the kernel (all you need is a firewall - iptables takes care of that). Linux is not prone to viruses or malware.

If you have LOTS of free time, and you want to actually LEARN about linux, the hardware in your computer, the deepest internals of the system, and want the distro with possibly the cleanest package management system I've used, check out Gentoo Linux. It's not for the feint of heart - you need to learn lots. It may even take you a whole week to get it up and running, and even then your install will be crap. That's what happened to me, anyway.

After getting the system up I never looked back. Gentoo is and will always be my distro of choice because of the immense control I have over EVERYTHING in my system, and the hardware in my PC. It's pretty much Linux From Scratch but with a package manager. Give it a whirl - you'll find the documentation excellent, the community helpful and when you're done you'll get that sense of gratification that you could never get if you just put a disk in and clicked "next" a few times.

You don't need either antivirus or anti spyware on linux.

Search the forums here, it gets asked all the time by folks recently coming over from windows. There is no spyware for linux, and there are virtually no virii. Since *nix users run as regular users and not as root (administrator in winworld), you can't install virii that effect the whole system, just your personal files. All the security companies hope and pray that a linux virus happens so they can sell linux antivirus, but it is very unlikely, and just a pipe dream of theirs.

There are linux anti virus clients, like clamav. Those really aren't intended for desktop systems, as they do no good. They are intended for mail and file servers, to block a virus at the server level, and prevent windows clients from having to deal with it.

Linux will be able to see your windows files, but right now writing to them will be tough. NTFS read support is fine, you can open anything from your windows drive under a *nix program, like a word or excel file, but making changes to the copy on the windows drive is not 100% supported yet. It does get closer every day though. What you could do is copy a file from the windows drive to the linux, then make changes to it, but you can't with 100% accuracy replace the file on the windows drive with the new one.

If you don't mind installing over the windows on your second drive, that will work fine, and any linux installed will do that. Just tell it to delete everything and repartition the 2nd drive.

Peace,
JimBass