I finally got round to doing away with the slow-loading, out-of-date, vaguely commercial Fedora Core last night and stayed up rather late getting ubuntu on. I must say, it really advertises itself well as it was insanely easy to install. Boot from the CD, and after a few minutes you have a fully working system. Obviously there are some limitations as its a live CD but it’s a nice philosophy - just run ‘Install’ from the desktop. There are a minimum number of options and it’s painless enough. I wiperised my old partitions and then with a little fiddling (that needed some thought due to an interface that wasn’t an obvious as I would have liked) I got it to create what it needed. Once installed and rebooted it updated itself, which was done very professionally. My task before going to bed was to get the bootloader to default to windows. I got some help with this (and with other things) from my ubuntu-savvy friend nalioth and got this sorted rather quickly. He tells me not to assume anything as the distro is so different - fex, apparently all I need to do to get my printer shared over the network for the benefit of the laptop using a simple applet somewhere. Unfortunately, I may not have time this evening but I hope to. Then I can use it almost exclusively.

I did want to use gentoo but I don’t think I’m really good enough to get it working graphically without frying anything. So, I’m sticking with my current little setup for now and maybe the no root philosophy will grow on me!