Hi, I was thinking of buying Debian with the five DVDs of software from their co. Is that a good idea? $20.00. Is this possible with Mint or Ubuntu or Fedora...?

Does Debian have good security from data theft...? Password protection and encryption, I never needed it before now so much.

Can Debian dual boot with XP?

Is WINE effective in Debian?

I heard Debian has a lot of software, compared with say Slackware which it's users love however saying the software is upgraded better. Any comments?

And Mint has all Debian and Ubuntu software available, sadly for me, I found it had a fault built in in Mint 9.

I use a Pentium 4 dual core with 3Gb RAM and a NVIDIA graphics card built in with 512 Mb RAM of it's own.

All the best.

Answering all questions one by one.

- Are you sure you need all 5 dvds? If you are about to install it to a pc with slow or no internet connection, then go ahead and buy them.
If not, download the relevant installation iso, burn it on a disk, boot with it, install debian and download the packages you need from the repos.

- Yes, although I have never used either of them.

- Yes, that's how my setup is.

- Yes and no, depending on the application you want to run in wine.

- If latest and greatest is what you want, you should better look in testing and unstable branches. They contain a little more stuff than stable and in more recent versions. Of course, stuff that got deprecated since debian stable was released, eg kde 3.5.10, cannot be found there.

- Mint was ubuntu based since it first started and now they are making an attempt to switch to debian (testing) based in order to get it as a rolling release.