New OS

[Managarm]

Hi, (this is a long post please bear with me.) I'm looking for some general advice. I've owned an Amiga since 1992 and the only change has been to go from an A500+ to an A1200. Someone gave me a PC with Windows '95 a couple of months ago. It's not very powerful and it seems that upgrading it would be more hassle and cost than buying a new one. There's a shop near me selling a PC with a Pentium 4, 80gig HD, 512mb for £150. (It comes with Windows XP and the guy said he'd knock money off if I didn't want it.)

The point is I don't want it, I don't like Windows. It's not an anti-Microsoft thing I just don't like using it. We have Windows 2000 at work and I'm not mad on it at all. As for my Windows '95 machine I think I'm going mad. I've encountered what the net refers to as 'DLL Hell' I spend my whole time reinstalling DLL files.

What other operating systems are there I can use? I know the main alternative is Linux, I don't know too much about that. I've used Mac OS on a friend's machine and quite liked it; Idon't suppose there's anything like it that will run on x86 architecture. Something that handles like Amiga OS would be nice. :-) I have to say I'm not mad into the idea of getting Morph OS or any of the other Amiga derivatives. Any ideas would be much appreciated.

[Managarm]

Nice one, thanks. I'll Google the ones you've told me and see what comes up. Is Linux really difficult to install?

[Managarm]

food for thought... To be honest I was only holding out for something vaguely Amigaesque in a lazy sort of way. I see your point about choosing apps first. I'd mainly be wanting to browse the net, emulate old games, store pictures from the digital camera I'm about to buy. I've read too many horror stories and seen too many ruined computers to dream of putting a Windows machine on the net. (Last week a friend of mine had their computer knackered and they were using Firefox which I thought was secure.)

I'm going to spend a while looking up Linux on the net. It seems to be quite well supported in terms of books and websites about it.

[Managarm]

Thanks for all the help everyone. I was at the North Thames Amiga meeting on Sunday and was VERY impressed by OS4 (First time I'd seen it.) To be honest if I was getting a PPC machine that's what I'd be after. The skins are a nice feature, if you're a sadist you can make it look like Windows XP. Zeta looked quite good too. I think the winner is SUSE Linux though. I get my beast of a machine on Friday and it will be Linuxed.

http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/overview.html

[Managarm]

Thanks for the replies everyone, I thought this thread had died. I ended up installing Ubuntu on my new machine the other week. It seems pretty cool but I'm still getting to grips with the Terminal. I'm currently trying to install the java compiler and it's a bit troublesome. I loved the fact that you don't need to find drivers for sound and graphics which was quite annoying when I got the Windows '95 machine.

I now don't know what to do with my Pentium II, Windows '95 PC. It really only serves two purposes at the moment: Providing the Amiga with a HD floppy and CD through PC2Amiga and playing Golden Axe 3 on the Megadrive emulator. I was thinking of just storing some of my music on it but I'm not sure it's worth it as it's only got a 4gig hard drive.

Does anyone know of a good piece of software that does what PC2Amiga does with a Linux machine?