Well, I've been and gone and done it - downloaded Ubuntu 12.04 - and I'm loving it.

Here's the site if anyone else is interested

Desktop | Ubuntu

It took quite a few attempts to download and eventually burn a disc, but now that it's on the hard drive, it's working well. It wasn't plain sailing, but it wasn't that difficult either, so if I can do it, anyone can.

For anyone on a tight budget, or only has a computer sitting in the corner for decoration and limited use - I'd say it's better than paying Windows for the licence.

There's an active forum with ongoing advice and tips, not to mention help should things go awry. Trust me, I've used the forum....

Haha, its great isn't it. I'm currently downloading it, it will be installed once XP is working, or till i lose patience cause I've been waiting for this for a looong time!

I have it on a hard drive in shop that I'll be using as a test HD. It took a few attempts to finally get it installed and going. Not sure why. Seems to me that something so great and reliable should have installed better. But, it's working now. We'll see.

Hmm odd. How come you two had problems. Hope it goes smooth for me, XP has got me tiered and bored, two days just trying to figure out why its needin activation again. The WUBI install is smooth but not worth it, I think it goes slower since its installed on top of xp.

I really don't know what was wrong. I was thinking about re-burning the install disk since I had tried twice with it. Thought I'd try it one more time and it worked.

What problems did you get? Wouldn't boot? What format was the partition, they say ext3 is the way to go for linux.

Was going to install it but not sure how many partitions to use, what was your setups?

I used the entire hard drive, and the first two times everything indicated it had installed okay, but it wouldn't boot up all the way...it would hang at a certain point. The third time everything worked okay.

My problem with the download was fluctuating broadband. Once that steadied, 12.04 downloaded okay, and the install was relatively easy. My only problem was with internet connection, and I got assistance from the forum to resolve the issue.

Like Busdriver, the os is the only one on the hard drive.

Having some dirs in their own partition will improve system stability, security, and boot times as well.

Take a look at this, https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/install...titioning.html

I think i will have boot, and root on their own partitions. I will have a 100gig NTFS partition(so files can be accessed from ubuntu and xp) so the home dir wont be getting its own partition this time. What do you two think?

Edit:
After some reading on it, I will try this setup. /root 500MB, /usr 10GB, swap 2GB. I was going to try 1GBx2 for swap, but think I'll try one swap partition for now.

Time to launch GParted!