[Elecraft] WinXP - SP3 ... too late!

[JohnE]

I will apologize for what in retrospect might have been seen as a cheap 
shot - without comment or support.
In my defense - it was an attempt at humor on a Friday afternoon after a 
rough week.

I was not suggesting that anyone should completely abandon Windows for 
Linux....
If you have an app that needs Windows, then run Windows.  I have 2 
laptops that run Windows
for Audio apps.  I would also steer clear from using Wine - unless you 
like pain.

However, it seems to me the situation might be looked at as an 
opportunity to give Linux a try.
Especially, as has been noted, if the computer has 2gB or less memory. 
Linux will run fine with that
constraint - not so sure what Win7 or Win8 need.

If your main concern is interoperability in the area of file sharing, 
I'd suggest looking at Ubuntu 12.04.
This distribution (and probably a boatload of other distros) comes with 
a file explorer that can work with
Windows shares.  You can drag and drop files to and from Linux from all 
over your home network.
If you need something better than that - for instance - if your 
application needs to write to a share,
you can install "cifs-utils" and "smbfs" - then you can mount the share 
without having to set up a
samba environment.  The commands looks like this:

mkdir /media/share
mount -t cifs -o user=USERNAME,password=PASSWD //192.168.1.88/share   
/media/share

Cheers....

JohnE
KD0NQC

> I have tried Linux.  It is just fine for those who have computers that 
> are not networked to each other and do not need access to files on 
> other computers on a network.  Yes, for Linux geeks, it can be made to 
> work, but discovering just the right 'tweeks' for Samba can be 
> frustrating.