I have been meaning to answer this for a couple of days
but kept getting side-tracked.
	If you like to learn and tinker/program, Linux is for
you.
	Since it is open-source, you are encouraged to learn how
it all works and contribute if you choose to the body of
knowledge.
	The issue is that no matter what one thought he or she
knew, in Linux there are lots of people who know more than we do
so the bar is very high to come up with something new that
hasn't already been thought of and replaced with something even
better.
	Think of it as kind of a seminar that never stops. You
will be humbled but one day, you will be an expert on some
aspect of unix if you stick with it.
	It has certainly been good to me and I haven't even
risen to the level of many others so
I hope those two XP machines have a lot of memory as that will
be the barrier you run against.
	I even own a few systems that could really do great
things if they had more ram such as run Orca, for example, but
you can run the command line on less than a gigabyte of ram.
	I say go for it especially if you can load up on RAM so
the systems can really shine.
	You might even like it so much that you get a system
with 8 gigabytes of ram, a terabyte of disk space and a really
fast quad-core CPU and run nothing but Linux on it. Firefox in
gnome and orca is quite accessible and you will also have all
that unix power to experiment with.
	A final thought. Really try to learn the command line.
The GUI is good and comparable to Windows and Mac but the
command line is where really brilliant things happen because it
lets you compose complex operations that are difficult to
impossible to do in the graphical desktop.
	Someone once said, "Draw me a picture that says it is
not raining."
	It's safe to say that both interfaces have their
advantages. In Linux, you'll get to take full advantage of both.

Martin
"Dr. Ronald E. Milliman" writes:
> Bob, I am extremely interested in what all you are able to do with Linux