ok. This may seem odd, but I was just looking at mandrake 9.2 on ebay, and a screenshot showed WinXP running in Mandrake. How do you do this? I'm increasingly impressed with Linux, but I want to use XP for gaming. Thanks.

Linux uses a program calle wine to use windows programs !!!

There's an emulator out there called VMWare which lets you create virtual machines. (i.e. install windows in linux or linux in windows). The program is expensive for both platforms however. In addition, it emulates a really slow-end machine, so don't expect to be able to do any gaming through it. (Basically the most you could use it for is a web browser, word processing, light applications, etc.)

ok. thanks.

Also, You can run linux commands in Windows by using a program called "Cygwin". Its a linux enviroment for windows.

if you decide to go with linux i would recommend taking a look at winex this version of wine is ment for gaming so it works alittle faster for game play. and sorry i have never used cygwin.

hope this helps