I'm almost a complete newbie to Linux, three days and about twenty years removed from the PDP-11, but it didn't take more than a couple of hours to discover it's far superior to any windoze version. Povray and windoze (98 and XP) and a 500 frame animation = Crash at frame 230, no recovery, and two hours down the tubes. Linux breezed through the same file without any problems. (4 hours 55 minutes, particle count increases as time progresses) Windoze file manager causes the problem, kill it and the render will continue, but without saving the frames, not much sense in doing it. SuSe Linux 9.0 Pro has win and dos emulators included, some programs, Art of Illusion being one, will run under either platform as long as Java is installed, no emulator needed. Some others come in either Linux or windoze versions, but I haven't gone that far yet. Still trying to remember the unix pipe commands. One can get pretty rusty after a long time using windoze. (And you have to admit that having a "gzipped tarball" beats having a zipfile.)