As with the other recent discussions about LiveCDs, the hardware he is using may make the decision for you. Is his PC old and slow and low on RAM? If it is decent and at 128MB of RAM, I would say put him on Mepis (www.mepis.org ). It is a sweet, smooth, desktop oriented, Debian-based distro. Just don't give him one of the beta versions, stick with the stable releases. There are sites linked on mepis.org where you can download for free, including ibiblio.org and if you feel compelled to you can donate to receive the newest stable ASAP when released and from fast servers. I usually wait a bit anyway and the free servers have been pretty fast except for ibiblio.org.

Another problem for him using a LiveCD, if he doesn't know what he is doing, is setting up the network/ISP connection each time. If he has cable or DSL it's dead easy, if dialup, you may have to write a few settings down for him and post them next to the PC. YMMV. Mepis has a neat little GUI config tool for this and other stuff.

Brian Kelsay

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"Jonathan Hutchins" <> 01/25/05 01:56PM >>>

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

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.

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.