mahmood,

For a beginner I would recommend RedHat Linux. It has a lot of good configuration tools and wizards, so you don't often have to use a terminal to get things set up. It should be straight foreward to install it on a desktop. A laptop is a bit of a different story. I've Installed RedHat 8.0 on a dell Inspiron 8100, and not everything was easy to get running. To download:

www.redhat.com

Latest version is RedHat 9.

If you want more of a challenge however, you might want to try debian. Allthough I have not tried it myself both debian and suse are supposed to be very good distributions. (Don't think you can download SuSe from their homepage though.)

When it comes to programs and compatability, you can't automatically run windows programs in Linux. Having said that, there are programs like Wine, that will allow you to run some windows programs. It is still under development, but I have successfully used the µVision evaluation version using Wine under Linux. I don't know what pCad is, but it sounds like a big CAD program, and I would therefore guess that you will have trouble trying to run it. Wine does some "interpretation" of the function calls coming from the program you are running, and translates this to calls that Linux understands... (It isn't strictly an interpreter I believe, but I can't remember what the wine guys are calling it, not can I think of a better description of how it works...)

I haven't regretted for a second switching to linux (RedHat 8.0). You can get a lot of help over at:

www.linuxquestions.org


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