Question

[Brian Eric Farnell]

Hi, I'm new to Linux here and am looking forward to getting
involved.  I have some experience with Solaris systems, but not
much, the learning curve is killing me.  Anyway, a question...

I'm stuck with a Winmodem and even thtough there are some
Linmodem drivers for mine I was going to buy a hardware modem. 
I only found one internal PCI hardware modem at Comp USA.  It
says specifically that it workd with Linux, but adds 'kernal
2.3' or higher.  Is this a misprint?  As far as I have seen
there are no distributions running 2.3.  I'm running Linux
Mandrake 7.1 right now.

Also, I always heard how fast Linux was, for CLI it's great but
on KDE it seems to be everybit as slow as Windows 98.  Is this
correct?  I have a suspicion that my AMD 'shared memory
architecture'.

Oh, one more thing, I have had to re-install Mandrake several
times, I think the culprit is my Windows de-frag software, I
think it defrags my Linux partitions into the WIndows section. 
Since Windows recognized the presence of an 'un-formated' D
drive, I figured I was safe.  I'd like to just dump Windows
completely, but unfortuneatly there is some software I use daily
that Linux has no workable substitutes for (yet).  Perhaps I can
learn enough to do a little 'homesteading'.

Regards,
Brian

BTW, are novices welcome at your meetings?