[Sderby] Newcomer to Linux

[Hedley Quinton]

Thanks to those who have helped me get over my posting hurdle. 
(Actually feel something of a prat).

Being sick of Bill and all his works, with the launch of Vista, and 
the inevitable pressures to 'upgrade' at a high cost from XP, I 
decided now was the time to do what I have been promising myself for 
several years - change to Linux.
A bewildering range of possibilities emerged. Of course I was seduced 
by the apparent 'zero' cost of some of the offerings. Ubuntuu seemed 
to me to be attractive, nice website, pictures of happy geeks 
wallowing in Ubuntu. So I went for it. Downloaded several version of 
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, did a disc image copy of each, popped them in turn 
into my dvd/cd drive and attempted to run them to get the full 
flavour of the Linux revolution. Result, zilch. Only one of them got 
anywhere and that was Ubuntu 6.06 that froze after announcing that it 
was loading device drivers. Lots of time spent trying all sorts of 
ways to persuade them to go but of no avail.
More to this than meets the eye I thought! Why don't I just fork out 
the cash and buy Suse 10.2 and be done with it? (or maybe Red Hat or 
whatever). Commercial offerings, bound to work, or will they?
So I joined sderby LUG, they are bound to have the answer, I thought; 
so come on you experts give me some clues.

Hedley Quinton