Quote: Original post by mikemanBtw, I meant I don't want to do a real installation *yet*. I use Virtual PC to check out what's out there, once I find a distro that suits me I will install it properly. Of course I have to resolve issues like this one first. Btw, what disto(s) would be best for a development environment?

Part of the problem with what you're doing, is trying a new distro with dated hardware. By installing Kubuntu on a "real" machine with recent hardware, you would be getting a real taste of its capabilities. AFAIK GTK rendering would be dog-ass slow on a Trio64 card. The networking you set up during the install doesn't look correct either, but this is trivial during the installation, presuming you know your IP, gateway, and DNS servers.

I'd highly recommend what the previous poster suggested: grab a small hard drive, unplug your current one, make the smaller one the default, and give it a real test drive.

With an installation of Code::Blocks IDE, and packages like gcc, build-essential, sdl-*-dev, and so on, you will have a decent programming platform.

No particular distro is better or worse for a *development environment*, as all distributions under the hood are more or less the same. Gentoo uses one form of package management (emerge), Redhat/Fedora/Mandrake use RPM (or possibly yum?), Debian/(K)Ubuntu use apt. Some system file layout differs. Some default security features have minor differences between distros. But one you learn the basics of Linux commandline manipulation (e.g. directory/file access, drive mounting, package (un)installation, and so on), the rest of the OS is common across distros. KDE is KDE. Gnome is Gnome. Applications found therein are identical across Linuces (and incidentally, across Windows and Mac OS X and *nix and whatever else they're built for).

And incidentally, as a distro, *Ubuntu is very decent, as it is frequently updated, has excellent community support, and installation of packages is a breeze due to apt-repositories.

So go ahead and install that 2nd hard drive. [wink]