Success!

Congrats Chris, Now you can experience the wonderful joys of UNIX just like us Engineers up in Canada. You'll discover many wonderful things: core dumps, the dangers or recursively deleting files, segmentation faults and perhaps my favorite, fsck'ing an ext2 partition after the power goes out. Fun Fun Fun! ……?

ohh you went large man!!! my hero :)

Enjoy it Chris. Welcome to the world of Linux, Mandrake is a good place to start but as you learn more you may want to move to another distro. Interesting, there is the Windows v. Linux war and then when you finally switch to Linux there are distro v. distro wars. Whichever you choose Chris, welcome to the community.

Had Mandrake 8.1 on mine at one time and also tried Red Hat 7.2. I really liked the KDE 3 GUI – beats Windows hands down. Used the same basic apps as I do in Win2k (OpenOffice.org and Mozilla) I ran into two shortcomings.
1 – It would not work with my scanner (Visioneer 4400). Found that is is not SANE compliant.
2 – It would not work with the scroll wheel on my wireless scroll mouse (A4 Tech RFSW-25).

w00t! go Gnome!

What's Linux?
haha
jk
;)

Way to go Chris,
Keep us informed about what you think about it. I hope you find it as customizable as you like.
Linux is definately different from Windoze. What made you decide to give it a whirl?
Looking forward to your comments on Penguin Shell and or Windows Daily.

Congrats! I hope you enjoy it, or at least give the time to learn it and allow it to become the tool you use.

True, there's a big distro war going on, but I enjoy Mandrake. Second pick would be Slackware, only for the nostalgic value (it's what I cut my teeth on, so to speak, when learning Linux). Hope you enjoy it. I do. It's the Linux distro for those who don't feel like learning a programming language to get things to run.

Welcome on board Chris. Mandrake is great – if only someone could port Santa Balls to it it'd be perfect…

That's great Chris! I've been waiting to pick up a computer to install Linux on. Hope to join you in the Linux world soon!

Hmmm … migrating from the dark side, maybe? 'Bout time :)

Way to go!
Are you dual-booting with WinXP? Did you experience any installation problems? Have you done any tweaking since installation?
Chris, how much experience did you have with Linux before. It seems to me that you have mentioned using it before, but not very much. Right?
Go get em!

Bravo Chris! Pretty slick ain't it? I'm running 8.1 on an old P-III box with 64 meg RAM on it and it hums right along.

Next is to try gentoo, or lunar. source dists are my favorite=D running lunar linux on this new laptop wee =) good job.
Do you preffer it over OSX?

umm…uhh…yay?

The only right choise, go Linux !

WHY? Linux is a great tool but not for ME!

I got RedHat 8.0 installed on my laptop last week with help from my local LUG. I really like it!!