isn't the core2 64 bit ? I thought the intel core was 32 bit and core2 was 64bit. so maybe wrong distro?

It depends: if you want a completely opensource solution, go for the ATI board; the ATI opensource video drivers are *much* more mature than the opensource nvidia drivers. Mind, neither opensource driver works good enough in my opinion.
If you want to allow closed source software being installed, go for NVIDIA. their video driver is imho very good especially compared to ATI's fglrx driver.
I don't know what distro you're running, but opensuse for instance has community repo's (say, online installation trees) which provide the right driver for your rig automatically.
To sum it up: if you want to game,use 3d graphics, want nice desktop effects etc, go for an nvidia board with closed source drivers. if you want to live in 2D land and hate big corporations, go for ATI with the opensource drivers.

Hi all,
If I try to start openoffice as a normal user, the spash screen shows up briefly, and that's it. After some investigation (strace, gdb) it seems openoffice dies with a SIGBUS signal.
The same goes for NaNT (a build tool based on mono).
These programs do work when I run them as root.
So I thought it might be something smelly in my local config files, so I created a fresh new user and tried again. Still no luck. For some reason some programs won't run under a unprivileged account but they do under root.
Does anyone have a idea what's going on?
oh, I use a opensuse 11.1 x86_64 installation.
Cheers!

it's IMHO the only central system administration package for linux that actually does its job.
Mind, YaST used to be utter crap, but since YaST2, that is of the past. Nowadays I'm very happy with YaST2 and would suggest that other distros adapt YaST2 too.

native:

Nethack/Slash'Em (My all time favorite!!)
Ioquake3
OpenArena
Majesty
Mindrover
Kingpin
n.e.r.o.2

through wine:
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2
King's Quest 3 :)
Colin MrRae DiRT

I can recommend OpenSuSE (http://www.opensuse.org) for starters. A Nicely polished linux distribution. Support is also very good.

check out this link:
http://openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-LaserJet_1005

worked for me :)

Alsa vs OSS... that's not easy to compare.
First there was OSS. 4Front-Tech did the development and had its own closed-source commercial driver plus a gpl'ed crippled version in the vanilla kernel source.
Support was flaky, and for new hardware often not available.
So, enter Alsa. After a bit of a bumpy start, things were starting to look better and better. more and more hardware was supported.
Alsa seems to have become the de facto standard these days.
Still, the closed source version of the OSS driver is superior to alsa in quality.
Now the good news. 4Front-Tech has decided to release the whole OSS driver under the GPL. (http://developer.opensound.com/)
This is very good news because the OSS driver has matured for quite some time and performs in a lot of cases better than the alsa equivalent.
So the battle for the sound-driver has just started :)

It's of course "not done" to promote windows software on a linux forum.... ;)
but there is good news too:
Download http://handbrake.fr/?article=download (HandBrake).
It is available for all major platforms.
It is capable of ripping all kinds of video (i.e. DVD's, everything ffmpeg can decode) and creates various output formats (.mkv, .ogm, .avi).
64 bit, multi processor support, threaded -> very fast.
check it out.

this page describes what needs to be done.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=993136&page=2
it looks like quite a lot of work, but you only need to do it once :)