John, >>Nearly all my Linux use has been using bash on boxes used as servers >>or for machine control. I used X ages ago on solaris and rs6000 >>boxes. Now I have a Celeron 433 box available with 512 RAM that I >>want to set up as a Linux desktop to really and truly begin my walk >>down the yellow brick road away from the M$ desktop. My questions >>are: 1) does this 433 celeron have enough horsepower for GNOME or KDE? >>and 2) which of the two is better suited for a new Linux GUI user? I >>have RH 7.2. A C433 has more than enough horsepower for X-Win. My secondary desktop machine is a K6-233 running Gnome 1.4 and I haven't had any real speed issues. The real concern isn't X or Gnome, but other media programs under X such as Video players or harddisk access delays. >>Also, 3) are there any good open source development environments >>available (replacement for visual studio or codewrite)? (yes, vi is >>an option, but I've become addicted to the color-coded keywords) Personally, I prefer Gnome. Both KDE and Gnome are supported equally well under RedHat. I started using Gnome under Debian when there were licensing issues with KDE and QT. I've stuck with Gnome because the developers at Ximian/Helix Code/Gnome.org have spent much more time writing a solid backend instead of releasing a good enough version. KDE does have it's strenghts, but I feel that Gnome will become the dominant Desktop in the near future. -- Chris Lewis shadow@digitalnirvana.com ---------------------------------------- If it compiles, it is good, if it boots up it is perfect. - Linus Torvalds ----------------------------------------