• Instead of IE and Outlook...Mozilla includes a web browser and email client many consider better than Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook/Entourage. The only thing missing is a calendar/scheduling app, but there is a separate Mozilla calendar component in development that already works great. I personally just use the web-based Yahoo Calendar. And if you do switch to Linux, Ximian Evolution is a complete replacement for Outlook especially if you use Microsoft Exchange. See the article "Ximian Evolution fuels interest in desktop Linux."
  
  
• Instead of Microsoft Office...OpenOffice is a complete replacement for Microsoft Office. A word processing program that can open any Word document and save as a Word document. A presentation program that can open, save as, and run Powerpoint presentations. A spreadsheet program that is compatible with Excel. I installed the developer edition (currently OpenOffice.org 643) instead of the release version OpenOffice 1.0.2 because it adds even more features and compatibility, such as exporting anything directly to PDF or Docbook formats, and the applications have more intuitive names ("Spreadsheet" instead of "Calc", "Text document" instead of "Writer", ...).
  
  For more information see these reviews: "OpenOffice.org --as good as Microsoft Office?" and "MS Office too pricey? Here are 3 free alternatives." There is no database component such as Microsoft Access, but this is because most people use MySQL or PostgreSQL in Linux.
  
  
• Instead of Notepad or Wordpad...jEdit is a free and open source plain text editor useful for programming and html editing that runs on any platform.
  
  
• Instead of Photoshop...GIMP for Windows is a windows port of a popular Linux image editing application that has much of the same functionality as Adobe Photoshop. Unlike the above apps though which run equally well on any platform, this may possibly run best natively on Linux.
  
  
• Instead of Personal Web Server or IIS...The Apache 2.0 webserver, MySQL 4.0 database, and PHP 4.3.1 scripting language all have Windows binaries available and run great on Windows. They are good practice for running a server on Linux.
  
• Instead of Media Player, AOL Instant Messenger, Quicken and Microsoft Money...When you do switch to Linux there are virtually identical applications available, such as XMMS, GAIM, and GNUCash. See this webpage on converting from windows to linux for a list of Windows applications and their Linux alternatives. MSBC's The Alternative lists Windows applications that are alternatives to Microsoft's applications. Finally, download.com lists numerous other Linux applications and games.

When you feel comfortable using applications such as Mozilla and OpenOffice, then trying out or even completely switching to a Linux OS will be much easier to handle, because you'll still be able to use all the same applications. The main things you need to do are decide how you want to install Linux, and which Linux distribution you want to install. The top three choices about to be released are Red Hat 9, Mandrake 9.1, and Suse 8.2. There are many debates about which is best, but the bottom line is that all are very excellent and more similar than different. See below for more opinions. If you would like to purchase a boxed version of Linux with manuals and CDs (for about $35 and up), Suse appears to be a very good choice. If you do not want to spend a dime and you have access to a CD burner, CD burning software (there is a trial version of Nero Burning ROM available) and a fast Internet connection, then go to LinuxISO to download the ISO CD image files for a Linux distribution such as Mandrake, or download the "live-eval" version of Suse that runs completely off a CD instead of your hard drive so you can give the latest version a test drive. While the "live-eval" version of 8.2 will soon become available for download, SuSE will not make the full version of 8.2 available for download as ISO files, only older versions. Mandrake and Suse also have PPC versions of Linux for Apple computers. I personally have only tried Mandrake (and LinuxPPC a long time ago), but I may try Suse 8.2 when it is released.


Here are some comparisons between Suse, Mandrake, and Red Hat:

• Comparing four major Linux distributions


• Who Wins the Shootout? (between Xandros, Mandrake, Red Hat, Lindows, Suse)


• SuSE, Red Hat in Linux shootout

If you want to install Linux on the same hard drive as Windows and be able to "dual boot" into either one, you'll need to resize your Windows partition to make room for new partitions for Linux. First though you of course you should back up everything. Partition Magic is a commercial Windows application that resizes and creates partitions without erasing the data, but the Suse and Mandrake installers apparently will also be able to resize partitions too. Click on the icon for your hard drive to see if you have a FAT32 or an NTFS partition. NTFS is a Microsoft proprietary format that the Linux distributions are only recently able to handle. The installers for the new Suse and Mandrake versions will be able to resize NTFS partitions too, so you may not even need Partition Magic. To view the files on your Windows partition from Linux has previously been tricky. Suse apparently handles this for you, but in Mandrake you should go the Mandrake control center and click on "mount points." This edits the /etc/fstab file so that your Windows partition is mounted in the /mnt directory and accessible to you. See this forum for more info.

If you want to run Windows applications such as games off that partition within the WINE emulator in Linux, then you will need to set the "execute applications" permission as well as read and write permissions. At present Linux can only handle read-only access to NTFS partitions, but the new versions coming out may change that. Of course you can also change the partition from NTFS to FAT32 but you will have to re-install or restore everything because this deletes all data on the partition.