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I am putting together a new system in about a week and I am planning on trying out Mandrake on it. It is an amd 2600 (forget chipset) with a soundblaster audigy 2 for sound and an ati radeon 9500 pro for video. Will it be hard to find linux drivers for this system? I read somewhere that you need a x86 processor or something like that to run Wine, does this mean I can't run it on this system?
You'll have to look around for information regarding your hardware. I don't know how new/old either your sound and video cards are, but they are most likely supported. As far as WINE goes, if you could run Window$ of your PC, you can run WINE.
As far as alternatives go, you have more than your fair-share of of choices.
Winamp on Linux = XMMS (X Multimedia System.) It is usually included on just about every distro by default. I like to just use the command line with mpg123, and ogg123.
Trillian on Linux = GAIM or KAIM, etc. etc. There are tons of these things, and your distro should have packages for more than enough of them
M$ Media Player on Linux = There are quite a few. MPlayer seems to be a favorite. I like Xine, personally. Xine can handle DVDs and all of the Win codecs. There is also AVIplay, Aktion!, tons..
Nero on Linux = A very good program is a relatively new one out called K3B. You can check itout here:
http://k3b.sourceforgre.net The one that is most likely included with your distro is XCDRoast. It is a decent burning utility, but K3B seems like it has most of the cool features that Nero has, like On-The_Fly burning for MP3s. Once again, I prefer just do accomplish this stuff on the commandline, using programs like mpg123, normalize, mkisofs, and cdrecord. Of course, VoidMain's mkcd script is an excellent utility that will let you burn *.isos in the background.
FTP Server on Linux = there are quite a few of these (seeing a pattern here?) I am using ProFTP. Its configuration is really easy, especially if you have some experience with Apache's directives. Another good one I have tried is WuFTP.
As far as your browsers, forget about Netscape and go with Mozilla. Mozilla is Netscape, without the spyware, and that stupid registration thing. Plus, you get a lot of added features of Mozilla that are not included in Netscape, like the pop-up blocker, and the ability to block images from certain sites (like ad.doubleclick.net.) Konqueror is a fine browser, that comes with KDE, and acts as a web/file browser, much in the same way as M$IE does. You also have Galeon, Epiphany, and Lynx (the text browser.) Pleanty of choices.
