TurboLinux made its name as a server OS, and this is quite evident in the Workstation version of the distribution that we reviewed. In other words, it's more complicated. An early indication of this for us was the absence of any KDE or Gnome information in the manual.

The text-based installation is relatively straightforward if you're happy playing around with hard disk partitions and understand your hardware, but will probably faze the inexperienced user.

We also encountered some incompatibilities with our Pentium III test machine that meant we had to change the graphics card to complete the installation. Although there was a driver for the chip in our ATI graphics card, we experienced bad screen corruption. Upon visiting the TurboLinux hardware compatibility database on their Web site, we discovered that they were having problems their end as well, so we resorted to e-mailing tech support (telephone support is not provided with this retail distribution).

There are better introductions to Linux than this. Probably best left to the professionals, this one, although it's certainly powerful enough once installed.