fair enough, seems we more or less agree on what's important, just achieve it by different means.

it's perfectly true, I can't afford a mac which would match or exceed the performance of my current PC, and why on earth would anyone want to "Upgrade" to a slower system?

well my twin athlon 1900+ with 2GB of RAM also does the trick quite nicely, so you are right, I don't need a mac.

can't say anything about that Don, since I have never bought a PC in my life.

I've bought a good few motherboards, graphics cards, CPUs and RAM modules, but never a PC.

I could (and at some point will have to) upgrade my current system to a dual core AthlonX2 ~4200 with 2GB of RAM and have change from £600. I don't buy rubbish, but neither do I buy stuff I don't need, so for now twin Athlon XP1900s with 2GB of RAM is doing the trick. I could do with a bit more CPU speed but with my last major overhaul having been in 2002 I'll have to replace most of the system. Still even if cost wasn't a factor there aren't more than 2 other people on this planet I'd trust working on my PC, and no employee of Dell or Apple has ever been on that list.

lol I can't even afford a recent PC let alone a Mac, keep on spending all my money on camera gear!

amusingly, I had no issues at all with dependencies for DCRAW (to the extent that I didn't even realise it had any short of a compiler) but lightzone flat out refuses to work on my system.

That's the problem with there being so many distros, even Debian and Ubuntu (Ubuntu being Debian based for the uninitiated) can behave this differently for no reason which is readily fathomable by the (though I say it myself) slightly above average user.

there have been successful actions where people have been refunded the OEM value of the M$ licence they didn't want and never used. I can't remember the details off hand but might be worth a google.

yes the lack of calibration tools is annoying, I would like to get something but since there is no Linux support I can't.

Still, 5 years ago there was almost no Linux on the desktop and it was pretty much impossible to get commercial software for Linux. This is changing at an ever increasing rate. It is my hope that we will see drivers for Spyder or the like soon.

I don't know if anyone else is interested, but I have just finished setting up my system to process PEF RAW files under Linux.

I'm slowly weaning myself off Windows since I have made the decision that I will not purchase Vista. In related news Windows is now officially my secondary operating system. I can now do anything which I do regularly as well or better penguin powered than under Windows.

It was actually remarkably easy, all the files I used had pretty good walkthrough installs provided you are tech-savvy enough to avoid panic at the first sight of a command line.

I'm using Ubuntu Linux, and since I have not been able to find a thumbnail display program which works well and does what I want it to (ie, display the thumbnails and nothing else!), I am using DCRAW to extract the embedded JPGs from the PEF files. I have writen what is quite possibly the worlds shortest useful bash script to do this for me and place them in a directory called "thumbs".

I flick through these and decide which ones I want to edit, then use GIMP with the UFRAW plugin to open the RAW files for editing, do what I feel I need to do and save as .xcf or JPG or whatever else seems a good idea at the time. UFRAW's controls are perhaps not the best, but they are functional and seem to produce good output. If you don't like them and feel like shelling out some cash then Bibble is also quite happy with K10D PEF files and is penguin friendly. I might well buy bibble in the long run, but for now I'm making do with the freebies. If only there were a Silkypix for Linux I would be sorely tempted.

The packages in Ubuntu's package manager are too out of date to read K10D PEF's, so I had to build UFRAW and DCRAW from source. This also entailed some swearing and cursing because of unfilled dependencies and missing compilers, but the help files were fairly specific about what needed to be present before the install would work.

this is the wrong time to admit that I was tempted to suggest a Fuji F31 over in the Optio forum this morning isn't it?