if a girl was thinking about ditching Windows on her Dell laptop and installing Ubuntu, what steps would she need to take? Obviously there's the backing up of all her stuff on her computer, and trying to retain all the 20 gigs (gulp) of music and the browser stuff. Does anyone have suggestions from doing it before, or a guide for switching your machines over? Does iTunes have a linux version?

The last question first, there is no iTunes for Linux and IMO if iTunes is something that is used all the time then Linux may not the OS to use. That said, there is a way. The Windows version of iTunes can run on Linux but I don't use iTunes so I've never tried it. A product call "Crossover Office" should make the process relativity easy although it probably can be done without it. I have no idea of how of a problem it is to move iTunes music from computer to computer which is essentially what one would be doing. You might be able to use Parallels or VMWare to do it too, but than means installing Windows for the virtual machine so I don't like that approach.

As far as the steps go, you'd want to boot Ubuntu off a CD-ROM and see if things work. Wireless networking can be trick because the vendors of wireless devices tend not to make drivers available for Linux and they are harder for the genius Linux elves to create drivers for. If wireless networking doesn't work off the bat, there are things that can be done to get it working, but if she doesn't want to mess around with it then it might be best to avoid. Wireless is getting better all the time, but depending on the hardware it is an area of caution.

Okay, as I was reading the Ubuntu documentation, it seems that I do not have a disk management utility of any kind, which the documentation tells me I should use under certain circumstances. What should I do to fix that?

I've never read the documentation so I have no idea what they are talking about. The only disk utility I run is fsck (file system check) which gets run every time the computer boot. There is a partition manager GParted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/) you might use if you wanted to resize partitions or something but I don't know what if that is what they mean.

Hmmm..... I was searching around the Ubuntu documentation looking for the page I was talking about earlier, but now I can't find it. Perhaps I was dreaming.

But mainly, it was something like a disk space viewer, or something. I probably have Windows on the brain.

WAIT!

Here we go. I was trying to make my Windows partitions accessable from Ubuntu, and the pade telling me how to do that was this one: [link]

Except that under my System -> Administration there is no following -> Disks, so I have no idea what the hell they're talking about.

I only vaguely know what I'm doing here....

Say you have a web page that's relying on Windows Authentication. That is, the directory with the web application requires Windows Authentication, so the first time a user tries to access a file in that directory, the Windows Authentication dialog box pops up. The problem is if the user clicks on "Cancel" on the authentication dialog box, the browser still tries to load the page in the protected directory, resulting in an inelegant error for the user.

Is there some better way of dealing with this?

eta: Ideally, I want to redirect the user to a page on the original directory (that's outside of the protected one).

Except that under my System -> Administration there is no following -> Disks, so I have no idea what the hell they're talking about.

Hmm... I'll have to take a look when I get home. I have a windows partition, but it was automatically setup when I installed. You might check in /media and see if it is there.

I can probably tell you how to do it without the GUI but I could try to find what you are looking for in the GUI tonight. That would be a nice GUI tool.

Thanks, Gud. No rush. Later tonight is fine, and in the meantime, I'll look in /media.

Gud, thanks for the advice; I was in the middle of writing a post to you when Windows crashed, as it has done every single time I've booted the damned computer for the last four days. Something with winlogon, I think.

I set up a partition and went to install Ubuntu, but the installer crashed and now the hard disk isn't seeing the primary partition that holds Windows. I loaded up Knoppix, and all the file tree and files are still there, but for some reason it won't boot. at this point I just want to chuck the thing out the window, except then I remembered that I really enjoy using knoppix. So I'm thinking about doing a hard-disk install of that. The only thing that holds me back is iTunes.

Stupid computers.

I think if you do the following on the command line a Disk management utility will appear.

sudo apt-get install gparted sudo apt-get install pysdm

Then in administration the "Storage Device Manager" will show up and I believe this is the tool that can mount other partitions in a GUI.

The Disks utility was in the previous version of Ubuntu and I don't know why it isn't there in 6.10.

I'd check to make sure the shares aren't already there. If you post your "/etc/fstab" file, I can tell you if a windows partition is being mounted automatically.

The Ubuntu install crashed? Hmm... If you like Knoppix you could also try Freespire, or Mandriva, or SUSE (choosing KDE instead of GNOME).