Ok, resident Linux guru here. I'll correct you where you're wrong, and maybe attempt to point you in the right direction.

Most O/S's don't like, or won't install on USB hd's. Or that they will, but they initialize the USB stack on bootup, thus resetting the HD, and it losing access to it's boot device. Generically not possible, without a kernel tweak/hack.

True, but as more and more integrated cards are released every day, it's hard for a kernel by default to support them all. It's like Windows in a way, in that it can only support a certain amount of devices. That limit is generally how many drivers they can fit on a CD/DVD without going too far. It's weighted more over the more popular devices/chipsets, rather than just cramming them all on there.

Also true, but as above, it's mainly a driver issue. Most laptops have everything on board. They have to. There's no PCI slots to expand with (Mini-PCI doesn't really count). But as new releases of linux come out, they start supporting more and more chipsets.

This is again a driver related thing. The standard VESA driver that comes with X supports the most widely used resolutions, and those are 4:3 based resolutions at most. Getting the driver to your video card will solve that.

Initially, it will see it as a mouse. As will Windows. libwacom (I believe), makes Linux see the pressure sensitivity.

Beryl is such a neat piece of software. Ubuntu has some of that built in. XGL I think it's called. Not sure how you switch it on. But it involves you installing all your drivers to make it work. As does Beryl, actually.

Just a slight variation of Ubuntu. You shouldn't really see much difference.

Good question

Not sure what that one could be.

That's not Linux doing that. That's the way HD's are. In work, I have a server with 400Gb (labelled) HD's in. I have 353Gb usable space. It's all to do with the definition of Gb. We define 1Gb as 1024Mb, and 1Mb as 1024Kb. They don't. They define 1Gb as 1000Mb, etc. It's not just related to that. It's also to do with the number of heads, sectors, etc. Plus the filesystem you use. Linux based filesystems may squeeze just that little more out than say, NTFS. NTFS is a very heavy filesystem, with it's major security things and all. Obviously, the FAT table has to store these, so that consumes some space. In fact, I have a bunch more servers at work with 160Gb labelled HD's, and they register at 149.35Gb (or thereabouts). There's absolutely nothing you can do about it, and you can't get that space "back", as it was never there to begin with.


Me and Cass use Linux here all the time. Admittedly, we have the Wacom tablet on a Windows PC, since CS2 is indeed more powerful than Gimp. However, if you can deal with some of the faults that Gimp carries, Linux is your best friend. You set it up right, then don't fiddle with it at all, and you'll be happy. We use Fedora Core 7 (formally RedHat), and it appears to be one of the better Linux distros around right now, supporting most major equipment, and added support for laptops all the time. FC7 saw a lot more drivers in the kernel. Cass's PC has an almost-brand new motoherboard. FC6 didn't recognise the LAN card, which meant we had to download the driver on my PC, put it on a USB stick, compile, load the kernel module, and reboot. FC7's kernel supports it by default. And you'll find that with a lot of new equipment. Windows will be the same. It won't recognise a piece of hardware, either it knows what it is but can't find drivers for it, or it hasn't got a clue what it is, therefore doesn't know where to start looking for drivers. 9 times out of 10, you go to the vendor's website (be-it the laptop manufacturer, or the motherboard manufacturer, or the chipset manufacturer), and they'll most likely have a Linux driver of some description, whether it be a module you just load in, or something you compile (the latter is most common).

Hope this helps, anyhoo

like i said, 9 times out of 10 you'll be fine. it depends mostly on how old your laptop is. if it's more than say 6 months old (new as in hot off the factory lines, not new from the shops..), then the latest fc will probably have drivers to support most of your hardware.
fc7 is as easy to use as windows is, almost. i suggest going for the kde install over the gnome, but i think that's just a matter of preference more than anything else.
if you have a folder on your hd that you can't get into, then it's most likely an ntfs partitioned drive (windows xp?). if so, right click on the folder in question, go to the security tab, click advanced, and go to the ownership tab. change the owner to yourself, and apply the changes. then go to the main security tab,  set your username to full permissions, tick the "replace recursive permissions with new ones" (that's the inheritance section), and apply & ok. it *should* reset the ownership on the directory, and let you in to see what's in there. or delete it, whichever you've been trying to achieve.

if you're using your external drive as your storage place, then you'll have no problems talking to that in linux. linux started to come with native ntfs support a while back. not for it's own file systems, that's still ext2/3 & lvm, but it can talk to, read from and write to ntfs based drives, so you can still access your stuff. you'll probably get some weird files alongside your normal files. ntfs stores so many properties for each file, the fat table isn't big enough, so it stores the data as extremely hidden files, starting with $. much like linux has files starting simply ".". then again you might not. i've seen both scenarios.

fc7 is as big as you want it to big, and is as much or as little as you want. remember, fedora core is still used on some of the major internet facing servers today. you can install it as a text-based operating system, with no desktop whatsoever. or you can have a desktop-based server, or a workstation. there literally is thousands of combinations you can run fc with. you get bundles defaults of course. "server", "workstation", "graphics", etc. each basic bundle of options installs all the tools you'd need to acheive what you want the box to achieve. so for instance "server" installs web servers, database servers, all the management tools, etc. "workstation" installs koffice (or openoffice), maths tools, accounting tools, etc. you get my drift. in the installer, you can browse the packages and install them there and then, thus making your install personalised. and each application name comes with a description of what it is or does. really does hold your hand through it, and would be probably one of the easier distros of linux to work with. the easiest being ubuntu, since you actually boot into gnome to install it off the live cd! (never done this though, so don't ask!!!)

It's possible that Linux thinks that for all NTFS based drives. Depending on how Windows shut down just before you booted Linux. It does that sometimes. It looks for a flag on the HD and if it can't find it, it says it wasn't shutdown (or may be damaged), and requests you do a filesystem check. It can't do that for NTFS, but it's own filesystems it uses what's called fsck (File System ChecK), which scans the HD, fixes anything wrong, and flags it as "clean".

I myself have never had to deal with Linux on Wireless networks, so I can't really help you. I'm a wired-network man, and they almost always work so long as it picks the card/chip up in the first instance!.

That'll be KDE, for some reason. Or a KDE component. Probably nothing major. To get back KDE applets that crash like that, they won't be in the menus. Right click on the KDE taskbar, and click "Add Applet to Panel". Then it'll give you a list of little applets and tools you can add to the panel. I have a little game, on my panel. I never play it, but it's cool!

The live CD may not come with it, as GIMP is a large application in itself, and will probably take a lot of space on the CD. If you download the DVD to actually install though, you'll have the option to install it straight off the CD. (You may even find Wacom drivers on there. Not sure whether it's at a stage to be bundled yet).

Again, that'll be, on the most part, down to the driver. The tablet is meant to represent the whole screen. So on a regular 4:3 screen, a 4:3 table will represent the screen. Imagine your desktop just beneath the drawable area on your table (like a touch-screen monitor). Problems arise (and I've also seen this on Windows), when your screen is 16:9, and your tablet is 4:3. It has to compress your entire 16:9 screen to fit in the 4:3 space. So your drawing appears longer than what you intended. I would have thought this would have been configurable. But again, I've not spent too much time with it. What you're experiencing is Linux without the Wacom driver, and it thinking it's just a mouse. But the Wacom isn't passing movement points to the Kernel like a mouse does. The tablet is passing screen co-ordinates. In this case, distance from the top/right, which is why every time you present the pen to a particular point on the tablet, your cursor ends up in the same place on screen. The driver talks to the tablet to ensure it passes the right set of co-ordinates. It even tells the tablet the screen resolution, so that it can get the co-ordinates right. No driver, makes it do what you've got it to do

The crash you had wasn't actually an entire Linux crash, just a component. Me and Cass have it sometimes too. I nearly said "all the time" there, but then realised that it wouldn't actually be true. We get something weird/crash happen once every few weeks or something. Depends on how they feel. My "all the time" crashing phrase comes from my still-used-to-Windows-ness. Have to use Windows at work, see.

Well, right now I'm in no position to 'just get another computer', but I almost have to.  I guess that's an idea.....if I do have to replace it, I guess installing Linux on it wouldn't hurt until the video/motherboard dies, if it does.