[ale] Greetings and introduction

[David Nixon]

I am an avid gamer/geek that has been firmly entrenched in the windows 
world for eons.  I tend to upgrade constantly and I game quite a bit, 
and so always had trouble with Linux.  I have spent more than $1000 on 
various distros, but in the end have always been forced back to the 
Mother Ship due to an incompatability, lack of driver support, or the 
inability to play a particular game.  I tried dual-booting, but hate 
maintaining two OS's.

I have dabbled with Linux for many years, learned some things, had some 
fun, but never got to the point that I could stay with it full time.  
Off the top of my head, I have used(usually multiple version numbers):

Mandrake, Lycoris, Lindows, Suse, Red Hat, Fedora, XandrOS, ubuntu, 
eLive, Mepis, PCLinuxOS...And many more. 

I want to learn more about it, and get it to the point that I can make 
it work for me and not have to go running back to Windows for 
something.  I do not like the issues with Malware and the direction that 
DRM is headed scares me.  I want to attend some meetings or shows and 
dive into this and see if I can get it right.  I am in sales and 
consulthing and so there are things that I need Windows for, but I have 
a laptop with XP and a second desktop PC with XP as well.

The machine that I wish to run Linux on has the following hardware:

Coolermaster Centurion5 w/Antec NeoHE 550W
Abit AN8-SLI / Opteron 175 dual-core at 2.5Ghz
2GB Patriot Extreme Performance PC3200 DDR
2x Geforce 7800GTX in SLI mode
Creative Labs X-Fi / Logitech Z680 speakers
74GB WD Raptor / 400GB Hitachi SATA
Samsung 16x Dual-Layer DVDRW / Liteon 16X DVDROM
Dell Ultrasharp 2005FPW 20.1" widescreen flat panel

I am sure that the sound card will give me trouble, but I can swap that 
out for an Audigy2 or something if needed.  Basically, I want something 
64bit, robust, full multimedia support, some modern gaming ability(FPS), 
3D support and SLI enabled, etc..  I have always been attracted to Suse 
in the past.  Anyway, that's the hardware in question, so the distro 
needs to be appropriate for it..

Anyway, that's my background and situation.  I know that this is not an 
advice forum, just wanted you to know where I am coming from and what I 
would like to get out of the Linux community in general

I plan to come to some of the meetings to educate myself and to meet 
others like me, as I am sure that I am not the only one in this boat.  
If anyone has any advice, shoot it my way, but in the meantime I hope to 
check out the group and see what you guys have to offer, and hopefully 
in time I will be able to find a distro and learn to make it do what I 
need and I can leave Windows behind for good.  I want to be a convert, I 
have just not yet been succesful at it.  If you guys feel that this is 
not the group for me or is not what I am looking for, shoot me an email 
and maybe point me in the right direction.  I found this site by 
Googling for Atlanta Linux users groups.  Thanks!

Dave