I'm planning to move to the Linux World and I'm looking for the corrisponding software in Linux for EAC, an MP3 player and other music software that we use in Windows. Any suggestion?

Ha! Audio and linux are a fundamental problem. Actually there are many excellent applications (ex: cdrtools), and fewer hideous ones (ex: RealOne, MusicMatch, etc).

First start with your sound drivers/libraries, which one do you want to use? There are several Jack, ALSA, arts, esound, more. The sound driver will determine a lot of software you can and can't run.

and correct me if I am wrong, this is just from (recent) experience.

I've been using:

1) grip for ripping. It can be configured for various encoders
2) oggenc (& toying with the new gt)
3) Xmms is similar to winamp 2.x for playing

You can try koncd or xcdroast for burning

All of these programs come with Red Hat 8, but Red Hat isn't supplying
mp3 software due to licensing fear. You can get Xmms with mp3 plugin from the xmms web site.



So far I've been going back to Windows for line-in recording from LP's.

ALSA is a soundchip driver (meant as a replacement for the current OSS drivers in the 2.4er kernel series... ALSA is OSS compatible) + a lowlevel library to play/record sounds comfortable. ALSA supports more soundcards and has some more features than OSS but is harder to install
arts and esd are just sound daemons, which can be used to play back sounds... they are compatible at least with ALSA and OSS... and sound daemons are IMHO completely useless if your soundcard supports hardware mixing (this is how it's called?)
Jack is AFAIK just a plugin system (but I'm really not sure...)

For ripping CDs some frontend to cdparanoia (which is also used by CDEx) and oggenc/lame/whatever isn't really difficult to find.. I use abcde which is commandline based... but grip is also good
As MP3 player there's XMMS (which looks and performs like a Winamp 2.x clone ) and Zinf (former known as Freeamp). I use XMMS
When you want to edit sounds Audacity is ok... but it's nothing against the features of CoolEdit....

PS: OSS = Open Sound System

Perhaps the best replacement for EAC is a program called Grip - it uses Xiph's paranoia libraries to get quality rips, and you can configure it with quite a few different encoders. My only complaint with using Grip is that cdparanoia doesn't have the ability (that I know of) to log errors. There has been a lot of discussion on this board about EAC vs. cdparnoia, and while EAC's audio extraction methods are generally seen as being more sophisticated, cdparanoia is still a very good ripper.

The most common and versitile audio player is XMMS. If you've used Winamp, then XMMS will look very familiar.

As for hardware support and sound libraries...this can get a little tricky, and I can't say I know much about it myself. I have an audigy and had to compile a kernel module to get it to work, and my card works through OSS (Open Sound System). Other cards may work best through ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture). There are others, and I'm not sure if, how, or when they work together, but as you may find in Linux, sometimes there is more than one thing happening in the background to give you one simple result (like produce sound). Open source projects are like this - you'll get competing technologies and it takes a while for one to rise above the rest...sometimes a long while.

Does Lindows 3.x(Debian based, I believe), offers any advantage or better audio support(drivers, etc...) compared with other Linux distribuitions?
I'm very curious about that OS, but never had a chance to see how it works.

LIF

Lindows big thing is "wine" which allows you to run windows programs within linux,
and likely comes with more/all of that preconfigured and more DLL's supplied.

Just today I tried running Cooledit using wine and it worked in that
I was able to edit, play segments, and do normalization on a wave file.
Saving was problematic in that writng to NTFS partitions (whiere all
my windows stuff is) isn't supported. I haven't gone through a full
configuration of wine but as I said, it was able to run Cooledit with whatever
the defaults are.

NTFS reading and writing are supported with the latest kernels (and probably earlier ones too), but there are "severe" warnings about writing to an NTFS partition, so it is not very supported yet, so, it is possible with a recompile of the kernel (or just compiling the module), but I wouldn't try it on any of my partitions.

Yeah, I saw and heeded that warning and took it to mean something like "it may work at first, but will hose you eventually"

I think NTFS (even read) support is another thing Red Hat skipped on their stock kernel, allegedly
for liability reasons. I have read access compiled in now though.

Reading NTFS works fine, no problem.
Writing NTFS is given as a module (I think since 2.2 kernel) that is not enabled by default on every Linux distributions.
So if you want to use it, you must compile the kernel.

I used it sometimes. It worked fine for me.
But it's at your own risk.