What is your poison? What OS do you use and what are you thoughts on it?

Definitely yes!

If you try Ubuntu and then decide to install it, that is one of your options... It will create it's own SEPARATE Partition without harming the other existent partition, you then will choose which system to boot from by default and during bootup you can change to another.

You also have the very real option of running Virtual Machines and installing what ever OS on them you care to. This is really an excellent safety and recovery strategy. I have vm's of each box and should one crash, I can easily move it's functionality to another box.

Sooz... if you go to yard sales, you wiull be amazed at the number of people who sell decent machines for ~$20.00 or so! I have yet to find one I have to ever do any more then nuke the drive and then reload a clean OS. Buy a cheapie and then play with the different options.....

A good CD to burn is Ultimate Boot CD Linux based, (Ubuntu is in the Linux general family), it allows you to bring up a "Sick" machine and check it out. It has a plethora of utilities including the Nuke routine which will write 1s/0s randomly for 9 passes totally wiping out a garage sale HD and allow you to start fresh when you install your CD.

Also should you travel, having an Ubuntu boot disk also allows you when connecting to attend to personal matters without leaving a trail on a hotel machine. As well it protects you if you have a company issued lap top and you do not want your passwords, account numbers, etc. retrievable by some pimple faced geek in IT remoting into your machine.

That default login page does noit need a password, just blast right past it. I am very serious, I find serviceable boxes for under $25 all the time.

I use a Mac. Of course, Mac is Unix based too. I have a PC at my office that I run XP on, but only use that when I absolutely, positively, must run software with Windows (there are two applications I need to use that don't have good Mac versions...one of them of course being something put out by the US government...they just don't update anything often enough to keep up with Mac upgrades). Since I already had the PC, I didn't bother wasting space on my Mac by putting Windows on it to run that software. I don't use it often enough to make it worth wasting space with it.

I'm looking forward to the new OS for Macs. When have you ever heard of a new OS taking LESS space than the old one? [img]/domainskins/bypass/img/smileys/happy.gif[/img] Now that I've coerced an entire following of Mac users in my department, I have to wait for the department to count up how many want to upgrade and order the multi-user version. That used to be one nice thing when I was the solitary Mac user...I never had to wait to get new software, just tell the IT person I needed something new and he'd order it out of fear I might start asking him questions about fixing my Mac if something got obsolete on it.

I should partition the drive on my PC, now that I don't use it very often, and play with Linux. I've always wanted to try it, but don't know anybody locally who uses it to help me out when I get stuck about doing something while learning to use it. It's the installation that always looks difficult with that. Or maybe the only people I know who use it are hopeless geeks and like to make things look more difficult than they need to be when playing with computers.

I doubt you will need any help with the Ubuntu flavor of Linux. It should be rather instinctive for a Mac person.