Ages ago I installed Ubuntu 6 or 7 on my laptop besides XP, but couldn't really use it because it did not recognize my net card. Just had another try with live CD of whatever is the latest 10.11 or 11.10 and it found and used my net card so that part is OK. However, my language was not on the list (left side of the first screen) so had to go back to English. Changing language from inside did not make it recognize my keyboard correctly. So what is less trouble, install it in English and install the language support somehow afterwards, or order another CD with correct language support (or download and burn and ...) ?

Also I am still confused with Linux filesystem hierarchy. With other OSes I have always separated the opsys from my own stuff (programs & data) so that when I want to reinstall, the process only takes the opsys with it, and leaves my stuff intact. How do you do that in Linux? I have partitioned the Linux space into two partitions + swap, how should I use them?

On Linux you can put all the user files in /home to a separate partition. (even though it appears under the same filesystem tree)

Then if you want to format the system-partition, you just have to unmount the user-data partition from /home, and then you can format. (/home will appear to be empty)

Later when you install a new system, you can mount the old user-data partition under /home again, and all your user files will be there.

One partition is for the system, in linux it is called '/' ( root ). This will contain the system and all the configuration files. 10 gig is usually enough, unless you install a lot of extra software.

Your data should go in /home/youruserid/. This goes on another partition. This can be as big as you have room for. Swap is for swap, the system uses it if you do not have a lot of memory. If you have a gig or more, you may find swap isn't used.

I would think language support should be installable from the online repos. Sorry I can't help more, ( I use English ).

Thank you both, that makes it clear! Have to sort out the language thing tomorrow, probably Finnish (or Swedish or German) forums can help me with it.

Have to update the "language not found" issue - Finnish is there, but not as Finnish, but as Suomi, so if you scroll down the list, you'll find it.

Isn't that the native language of Linus Torvalds? He would be very disappointed if none of these languages are there.

As far as I know Linus's mother tongue is Swedish (as it is for 5-6 % of Finns). However, the only problem was that "Finnish" was translated while nothing else was.

How odd, I would expect every language to be translated -- is it perhaps because it is Linus' mother tongue, or because the language is named differently to the demonym (like British people speak English, for example)?