On 2009-01-31, dsi1 > wrote:
>
> The 2 Vista laptops I bought did not have an option for a Linux install.
> At the price I got them for, I'll take whatever OS is loaded on 'em.
> Does this make me stupid or a bad man?

Neither. It makes you an uninformed man. You do not need an "option" to
install linux. FYI, you could have gotten them cheaper with no OS
installed. It's called a "barebones" computer.

> I have a linux machine at work but there's room only for 3 computers and
> it's temporarily in storage. I have no problem with Linux but the 3
> computers run XP very smoothly and I have to have a good reason to
> monkey around with that setup. I also have two extra XP machines but
> there's no way I'd run yet another XP machine. The fourth computer will
> obviously be my little Intel Atom machine running Linux - when I can
> figure out where the hell to set it up. :-)

I'll leave the interpretation of the above to others.

> Another problem is that the proprietary programming software I use is
> not made for linux or for any Apple machine. I wish it did run in Linux
> but that's the breaks.

I understand that delima. What programming software is that? Are you sure
there isn't an OSS (open source software) alternative? Is it possible you
could accomplish the same thing with an OSS software?

> My guess is that you probably don't know what you're talking about when
> you say I have tons of choices. What are they?

Depends on what you are doing. I realize M$ seems to have a lock on your
choices, but do they? Did you know that you can run Window's Word and Excel
on linux? Do you realize you can send text documents in something other
than .doc files? A simple .txt document can be read by all OSs I know of,
including Windows, Apple, and Linux. Other formats like pdf, txt, html,
etc, are not OS specific. Again, we're back to choice. If you want choice,
you have to stand up for it.

nb