Newbe questions

[Hodgins Family]

Good morning!

Let's see if I can help a bit.

> 1. Will I be able to install Ubuntu with XP on NTFS? Will Ubuntu be able 
> to manipulate that formatting, or should I prepare a dedicated partition 
> myself?

Ubuntu wants to see some free drive space. If XP is using the whole drive, 
you will have to either i) use a partition utility (Qt_parted is one and you 
can get it on a bootable CD here: http://www.sysresccd.org/  ) to "squeeze" 
the XP partition down to size, ii) reinstall XP but only give it a portion 
of the drive then install Ubuntu onto the remainder of the drive, iii) get 
another drive and put Ubuntu on that. I did i) on an XP machine, but the 
process borked at some point (FWIW, I had Norton Go Back installed and it 
didn't like what happened to the mbr). I wasn't in the mood to fiddle 
around, so I did ii) without Norton Go Back installed and all went well. I 
did iii) on another computer with Win 98SE on one drive and Ubuntu on a 
second drive and that has worked well.

> 2. In the live Ubuntu's I was unable to access the other partitions on my 
> computer. This has not been a problem with other Linux distributions. How 
> can I access these partitions in Ubuntu?

Yeah, that. I got into a discussion a while back about this. I CAN get at my 
hard drive (IDE) using the Warty Live CD. Another guy couldn't and it might 
have been because he had a SATA drive. IIRC, a third party (using Hoary Live 
CD) suggested that he had to manually mount the XP partition. I dunno if 
that solved his problem.

> 3. The remarks about not needing a firewall in the FAQ were not very 
> satisfying. If Ubuntu does not have an integrated firewall, what firewall 
> is recommended?

No help here. Shorewall is liked by some folks. Take a peek here: 
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/365208

> 4. What kind of anti-virus software is recommended for Ubuntu?

I've used f-prot. Others use ClamAV.

> 5. I am retired, but I still do some translating, and lots of reading in a 
> variety of languages. I own the Babylon translating tool in Windows, and 
> this is very useful for me. Is there anything like that in Linux? I don't 
> need anything like the mass translators (like SYSTRAN), just word to word 
> (or expression to expression) among English / French / German / Chinese / 
> Hebrew and such. I tried Wine without success on Knoppix, and searched 
> around the Internet, but found nothing.

No help with this.

> 6. In Kubuntu I was able to get the language keyboard system going, but 
> when I tried to type Hebrew in Open Office (I use it in Windows) no 
> letters appeared on the page. How can I gain access to Hebrew fonts? In 
> Ubuntu I was unable to get the keyboard choices working at all.

This is a problem that OOo users have discussed. This might help: 
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?p=95496

> 7. Can Evolution be tweaked to allow composition in Hebrew or Arabic?

Don't know. Sorry.

 > 8. If I install the pre-release 5.10, how will I be able to upgrade it
> to the final release?

Don't see why not. But why not wait until the release date...next week 
sometime, I think?

> Thanks very much for your patience in reading to the end of this long 
> list. My thanks to anyone who can help with the questions.

Good luck.

Rob