Thanks all!

I'm gonna download a distro off the net hopefully. I live in Japan and even if I did buy one I'd be getting a Japanese manual.

7gigs for windows dang ... that's a bit. Can't you run software off a partition or another drive? (windows question)

I'm just thinking of home/web page design testing use only. I "ahemm" use "bsd" everyday in the form of OSX but the covering layer is so nice and so friendly you don't really notice it at all. Which sort of has me going for Mandrake ... they got lots of cool screen shots I was actually running enlightenment a while back on OS X through Xwindows. Pointless but I wanted to see how long GIMP would actually take to compile.

10 gigs is cause I'm trying to keep this a budget box. I'm already over my goal of $150 ... I'm at about $220 right now ... Besides I just bought a Seagate 40 gig for my G4 the 10 giger is the orginal that came with my Mac.

Thanks for the installation tips, that just saved me lots of time to figure it out on my own.

Next step is how or what file(s) to download. I've seen lots about RPMs and such but ... have no clue.

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openoffice + gimp + sketch ...