That's possible, yes. There are methods of turning your current windows environment into a virtual machine, so if you have lots of available HDD space you could try something like this:clean up what you do not need install linux aside windows as a dual-boot OS now you can use linux or windows, whichever you choose clone your windows into a VM run the VM inside linux to make sure everything works delete the original windows installation and free up space profit... Now that's an interesting idea indeed! I am afraid that is not very easy to achieve, however that is not impossible. Hibernation is performed by stopping all running processes and writing the current total RAM content into a file on HDD, and on restore it is read back and processes are unfrozen. In theory it is possible to have 2 different files on your HDD, one containing the current windows RAM image and one containing the current linux RAM image. The going-to-hibernation-phase is easy, I'd say some quick patching of the hibernation code is enough to make sure each OS can go down gracefully. The wakeup phase is more difficult, You'd need to write an utility that can select which OS to wake up to and chainload correctly the image unfreezing. Doable, but could prove a challenge. (I could propably fix up something like that for the linux part fairly easily but I have no idea how to implement the windows side of it....)
As for flac, tell me when you find a program that does not support it! That's one possibility. I prefer smplayer (mplayer+gui) since mplayer is faster than vlc. Google Earth is available on Linux. All I could find via Google was a trojan. It probably would work under wine, but I don't quite see the point. There are several alternatives. The hard part is not switching the SW but convincing your contacts to use something else. My way was not forcing anything at all (e.g. by intentionally uninstalling Windows SW). All I did was trying to get the tasks I did under Windows done under Linux as well. Over the course of 8 months or so I gradually did more and more things under Linux until I one day realized that I hadn't booted Windows for half a year.
Kolourpaint is more or less an exact copy of MS Paint (at least it was when I left the MS sphere). If you don't like KDE, try gpaint, gnome-paint or rgbpaint. They all use the same principles, but unfortunately are missing certain small features, which make kolourpaint my only KDE program. Pinta might be worth a try too, but I haven't tried it so far. (Edit: Meh, it depends on mono) Mtpaint is pretty mighty for its low weight, but unfortunately also kind of cumbersome. I don't actually like it, but still use it sometimes.
+1 for mplayer. IMO the best video player hands down for any platform. Beats VLC in image quality and speed. I also use SMplayer as its frontend, but occasionally it has nagged me with some donation dialog, what's up with that windows like crap? For video encoding I use ffmpeg which is great and avidemux for simple edits like cutting, rescaling and adding new audio.. Haven't found a good fully featured video editor though. For photo editing ufraw and Gimp work fine for me. Darktable is nice for playing with raw images too, but too resource heavy for my measly ibm laptop (now almost 10 years old). Geeqie is a nice and simple image viewer, with basic options for rotating, reading exif and other stuff you'd expect. And nothing beats imagemagick for quick commandline image editing and batch processing. All in all you'll probably find reasonable replacements for most software you use in Windows and plenty that are superior to their windows conterparts. And who the hell runs apache on windows anyway? I'm probably not wrong if I say that over 90% of webservers run on linux. I suggest you to try out several linux distros and taking your time with them before deciding which way to go..It's probably easiest to start with Ubuntu, Mint or another similar fully blown install and move on when you've got hang of the basics. (And have gotten some idea what programs you like to use). I''ve been using debian 'testing' for last 9 years or so and would recommend that in the long run (no need for reinstall or full upgrade as it's basically a rolling release). I've found that sooner or later whole distribution upgrades (ala ubuntu) will **** up your system and be pain to fix making reinstallation the easiest option available. I think last and only time I reinstalled debian was some 4 years ago and that was simply for building a well optimized system on a new SSD. (boots to desktop in 6 seconds on 2004 hardware so worth it). Whatever way you decide I hope you enjoy getting rid of that spyware called Windows.
XP is still supported? http://31.media.tumblr.com/899c4d98e...xzwwo1_400.jpg