Just curious if I'll do this or not.

Right now I am struggling to use linux. I really want to do some sound editing from some recordings I made and have gone down this path. I am emerging from Win98 and Cool Edit. I just built a computer (Abit IS-7, 2.8Ghz Intel with Sata) and now when I want to re-install Cool Edit I can no longer do updates. Cool Edit is now in Adobe's house, and they want money.

Anyway, another reason to move towards linux. So I installed (dual boot w/ Win98) SuSE 8.2 Pro and have gotten jack and alsa working, but can't compile Ardour. I've read there is some breakage with gtk in SuSE and maybe this is my problem. Plus, I don't want to break that install since I also use it for my mail, docs, etc. In light of all that, I decided to try another distribution on another disk and leave SuSE alone.

I went with Gentoo.. probably a mistake since I didn't want to spend all that time installing it and learning all that new install stuff -- emerge. But right now I have it running KDE and playing a minidisc I recorded using alsamixer. But to continue there are so many danged questions. I am using a 2.4.20 kernel and wondering if I should try 2.6 ... but there's a lot of learning involved in doing that. Reading through the forums on Gentoo there's lots of people with problems and maybe 2.6 fixes some. I want to get jack and ardour working.. or maybe there is a better (less complicated) path to follow. Girlfriend is starting to wonder about all the time I spend sitting here.

I have 'emerged' (that's gentoo install talk) fluxbox as a windowmanager but have not yet tried it. People seem to want to keep a sound workstation as uncomplicated as possible.

I also wouldn't mind trying to get SuSE to see this new disk. SuSE is on an SATA Seagate 120 GB disk. Gentoo is now on an ATA Western Digital 80GB drive in a removable hard drive tray. I had to get an sata to ata adapter to get it to work. I unplug the SATA drive when I want to boot to Gentoo. If I leave it plugged in (power) SuSE boots, but I cannot mount the ata drive or run fdisk on it or anything. Won't see it. I even tried booting Knoppix and mounting that ATA drive and it couldn't or wouldn't see it. I'm new at all this so may not know the right thing to do. I have played around a bit with the master/slave settings on the ata drive but not enough to know if I have it right. But that is another struggle.

One thing for sure, I hope this coming year will make all this easier. I have hopes that linux can become user friendlier - I've spent way more time trying to get stuff to work than using it.. much too big a learning curve. Even the simpler things don't work for me sometimes. Like the stock SuSE install won't print to my parallel printer. Trying to get it and Gentoo to see and use my onboard nic was way painful. (a 3com Marvell Gigabit chip - using sk98lin driver).

enough for now, back to the forums. /jd