This book is a practical guide for all those Windows users who want to start using Linux. In practical terms, it indicates the possibilities of replacing Windows with Linux and perform all the tasks usually run with the PC. Mandriva was chose for this guide, although there are a variety of distributions of GNU / Linux, for two main reasons: ease of use of its graphical interface and wide range of applications. All applications mentioned in the book may be installed on any other distribution, which means that the concepts taught on Mandriva will be useful in other popular distributions as Ubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora.

The guide discusses the main features of Linux, and how to install and configure Mandriva. Then it reviews the main applications included in this distribution and, finally it focuses on different groups: office automation and productivity, Internet, multimedia, graphics and digital photography. In order to facilitate the transition between operating systems, each application of Mandriva finds its equivalent in Windows, so allows the reader to quickly become familiar with the operating system.