At the moment I have got Freespire installed (for 3 days) but I'm seeing increasingly good things about Ubunto and I'm considering swapping but I have one question first. With Freespire I can browse through my Win XP dual boot files and open documents etc will I be able to do this with Ubunto?

Web Users coverage and the fact that you can use getautomatix.com to install programs like picasa (which I can't seem to do on Freespire) is one of the reasons.

Thanks

Susan

When you say dual-boot files, do you mean the actual boot files themselves?

I cannot imagine on any Linux distro that you could not mount the XP volume -- probably safest as read only -- and then using something like Open Office, you could then read documents kept on the XP volume.

From all the dual-boot problems that are posted in LQ and elsewhere, I'd be keeping these environments very separate, and if you wanted to share documents keep these on a USB drive and share that across both OSs.

If you were in an environment with shared drives, I'd put my documents there, and using samba mapping from Linux, would access that shared drive.

Oh yes,you can do almost everything with Ubuntu,meaning you can read and write to Windows files,you can run Windows programs etc.Automatix is a cool thing but there are so many others too.Just install Ubuntu,then you'll see.

Indeed, I too recommend you install Ubuntu (not Ubunto) as it is much better than Freespire or Linspire or anythingspire (*spire)

Note: I don't like Ubuntu, but when compared to *spire, it's way better.

I agree, Ubuntu is made by dedicated professionals, well refined, throughly tested, has great support, deb repositories are hard to beat meaning virtually any software is available without much headache.

I agree that the *spires are pretty flaky distros.

You'll certainly find Ubuntu more stable, but perhaps prefer the KDE desktop of Freespire. If so, try PCLinuxOS or SimplyMEPIS. The latter actually uses Ubuntu repositories.

Well at the moment I am giving Kubuntu a go, the best of Ubuntu with KDE! I am no longer dual boot as I had a huge crash and ended up reinstalling Kubuntu over the whole disk so I am now 100% Linux and looking forward to the adventure. I picked up a book today 'Mastering Red Hat Linux 9' from Oxfam so I figured that would be a start. Sorry for the ignorance but I'm not sure yet whether Red Hat is a distos like Kubunto or an underlying system like Linux, Unix etc - I can but learn.

I've also had a look at Opensuse on live CD which seems pretty good etc it wouldn't find my wireless, posted elsewhere about that!

Thanks
Susan

I am used to installing open source material such as openofice, but presumably installing a new O/s would be different? I'm thinking of a dual boot, but Im wondering how you would swap from Windows to Linux.

Yes, it is a distro more or less like Ubuntu but it belongs to a different family (Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS family versus Ubuntu/Mepis/Debian/Knoppix etc. family). The differences tend to be minimal as long as you do everything from the command line but Red Hat has a totally different approach to installing and managing software so chapters treating rpm and yum etc should be irrelevant to you. Also I guess it won't help that Red Hat 9 is very much a legacy system (Red Hat is now at version 5, they started counting back from 1 after RH9 about five years ago). At least part of it must be outdated. It will be a good read but don't expect to find the answer to all or most of your questions.

Here is a link for Ubuntu, much of it should be applicable to Kubuntu too:
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Gutsy
One book I recommend for beginners is the Ubuntu Bible; another one is the Ubuntu book by Mark Sobell, which is one of the most thorough ones ever written.

You should really start a new thread for a new problem. You would swap using a boot manager like GRUB, which will be installed usually to the MBR, replacing the archaic Window$ bootloader (which will only boot Window$, of course). Then if you set it up right you can dual boot, or ever triple boot or more.

Thanks Tex, you have given me some clues, which is all I was after.