I posted in your other thread, Johnny, but let me add for the record in this thread that I had no problems with the older Ubuntu and Kubuntu distribution installers, nor the current "alternate" distribution installers, which use the legacy installer. Although I have not tried the new installer (I had zero interest), I have heard enough negative buzz regarding its performance that it may be a good idea to avoid using it for a time.

When I attempted to install ubuntu (Breezy Badger), I ran into problems because I was attempting to dual boot with Windows 2000, and ubuntu seemed to have problems with changing the partition size of NTFS. I then went back to Mepis, which worked just fine.

I have installed a dual boot system with both Windows 2000 and PCLinuxOS. There was no problem handling NTFS. I would suggest trying PCLinuxOS. It is without a doubt the most out-of-the-box/automagically-handle-everything distrubution I have yet encountered.

To be fair...
 

To be fair I feel I have to post this, although this may be the last post for this thread for a while, as I seem to have successfully installed Ubuntu 6.06 on my 250 Gbyte SATA and managed to retain both the WinXP Pro O/S that was on it first, as well as the WinXP Home that is on the 40 Gbyte IDE Drive.

:cool:

Verified that all 3 O/S's are working.

I went back to Ubuntu tonight and this time I didn't even try to configure the partitions, I just let it do it automatically. There is this one blurb in the set-up I didn't (and still don't) like which says something like "Let Ubuntu find the largest continuous free space" on the target drive for the partition.

Normally, I would assume that the "default" for the automatic settings would be an optimized partition set-up of reasonable (and not excessive) size. The language of this blurb implies the opposite; that Ubuntu was going to create the biggest partition it could.

But while considering possiblity this I decided that the programmers wouldn't have been that presumptuous, particularly when (one assumes) those using the automatic partition feature are going to be relative newbs, who may never use or even may uninstall the Linux O/S shortly after installing. So I went ahead and let it do it's thing and it seems to have done it's job flawlessly.

I still don't know what size the partitions are, so I can't say for sure how much of my 250 SATA got dedicated to Ubuntu. Iguess I'll find out eventually. Plus, it occured to me that I could probably go back into Ubuntu's configurations and change the parition size aftwards. So that's how I came to roll the dice one more time.

So I've taken the first step, chosen Ubuntu as my first Linux O/S and am now going to need to learn how to use it. Given the purpose of this thread was asking for help choosing a Distro, it may be that the thread's purpose is complete.

Thanks again for all the help, advice and "spiritually emotive support".


Johnny

you can do from under linux or under windows to see how your partitions are affected.

From what I've read so far, the current release version of Gaim doesn't support video/sound but version 2 beta 2 is rumoured to include gaim-vv which was designed to add video support - I haven't tried this yet as it requires replacing a couple of libraries with new versions not in the ubuntu repositories: libc6, lidbus and lidbus-glib.

I'll maybe try this next week... :newbie:

The main page on Gaim's website says that 2.0 beta 2 does not contain vv support for any protocol. Personally, I don't mind as I don't use voice/video anyway :).

Update...
 

Well for the most part I am well under way using Linux. Successfully running Ubuntu, WinXP Pro & WinXP Home off the SATA drive now for about 2 weeks with no problems.

Was a problem with trying to download and install Wine, which snowballed into a problem with my Repository, but that has been rectified and I have managed to install Azureus, but haven't yet started actually using it yet. Seems to work, but the file management part still needs to be figured out.

Thanks for the help in getting me started,


Johnny

Congrats johnny :) you've started on a long yet addictive learning curve :)

as for Gaim, the windows version supports SIP calls, which is a shame