I am trying out ReactOS, which is an open source OS that is being developed to emulate Window NT/XP. It's in alpha right now, but moving ahead prety fast. I use it some, and also have 98 & XP partitions - triple boot.

React website is at http://www.reactos.org/xhtml/en/index.html and the forum is at http://www.reactos.org/forum/

I'm waiting for a Linspire live cd to arrive in the mail & then i want to test that out too

From an admittedly quick look at the ReactOS site, while I think the idea of an Open Source operating system (OS OS?) is sound, I am left wondering who this is aimed at.

Photoshop and MS Office are generally incompatible with ReactOS, as is AVG, Norton and Opera. Important apps such as ZoneAlarm, Spybot and SpySweeper have not been tested for compatibility, nor have such common apps as Winamp and Thunderbird.

That's just a random check on the stuff I use or have used. Hopefully these failings will be addressed as the OS evolves, but with no firewall and AV support I think it would be risky to rely on it as anything other than a non-essential secondary OS, used offline.

Interesting to see the Open Source community working in this direction, though.

Gardena,
I haven't looked at the links yet but I too am interested in Linspire. My brother has been using it for a couple of years on his laptop and raves about it. I played with several versions of Linux over the years but never settled on one that I really felt would allow me to move from windows. To begin with the apps weren't there but not it's mostly an issue of long term management of the system and software upgrades. It seems that Linspire has ironed this last one out pretty well but I haven't tried it yet.

When you get it and play with it for a while, post something in the Linux forum. I'd like to see what you think of it.

ZZ