-----Original Message----- From: Jonathan Hutchins

Is Linspire still supposed to be the easiest distro for an entrenched Windows user to transition to? Do they have a live CD?

Well, that depends. Remember they like to charge for "add on" software that other distros include by default. Mandrake, Fedora, Mepis or Knoppix are probably all just as easy to install and use and all have live cds.

My Dad is still running 98, and he's having the normal accumulation of problems that 98 develops over time. He's thinking of "upgrading" to XP, and I'd like to show him a better way.

A I would say never upgrade to XP. Also I was surfing yesterday and came across a report that showed that W2K was the most stable of all the Windoze versions. If I were to upgrade someone's PC with any Version of Windoze this is the one I would use.

More important than compatibility with Windows software, I think, would be something that worked smoothly without a lot of patching and updating. That might bring him over, especially on a Live CD.

(Evangelism is wasted here - if he has to work too hard to do it the "right" way, he won't.)

In that case I'd say Mepis. Although, installation should be left for at least a PC literate person. Mepis powered by Debian and has a lot of functionality built in. I'm not thrilled that they use a unstable/testing configuration, which means that there is frequent updates available. But Debian has pretty good default answer built in. As far as patching. You could choose any distro and it would be great if you never patched it. It's not until we start mucking around with the internals that Linux distros start acting up (generally speaking).

Evangelism is never wasted ... in the mind of the Evangelist. ;')