Questions about installation

[jabberwocky]

My issue is basic: I want Ubuntu, but I'm a bit wary about deleting Windows XP, my current OS, but my poor little computer lacks the horsepower to run pretty much any form of dual OS program. Because I am paranoid, I backed up all of my files within my e-mail account (sending it to myself--simple, yet effective), and I would have no qualms deleting XP if I knew that I could download, for example, my pictures, music and documents without problems. Would these transfer alright? I exported my bookmarks to an HTML file and sent that to myself as well. Would this work?

Thanks in advance.

[D-cat]

Is this like a webmail service? If you're certain the data is backed up "in the cloud," then you should be safe. I personally think a DVD+R would have been saner, but hey, whatever works.

The ability to dual boot is more a function of hard drive space and not power. You don't run both simultaniously, you pick which one you want to run at boot. Ubuntu can be comfortably installed in a 10GB partition, so if you have that much free space, you might as well try the dual boot install. This gives you something to fall back on of something goes wrong or Ubuntu just isn't right for you.

BTW, if this is your only computer, I'd also suggest you first have a recovery boot disk handy. Parted Magic 4 is one of the best available. With extras like SuperGrub Disk available in the boot menu, you'll be able to boot into Linux or Windows (assuming dual-boot) should the bootloader install fail.

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

If you'll make images of your current system partition(s), you can experiment with different operating systems and distributions to your hearts content. If anything should go wrong, you can quickly (just a few minutes) restore the system image(s) to your computer so that you are right back to where you are now. I use a Linux version of Acronis True Image for all my own backup images, but there are free alternatives available, some of which can be found on the Parted Magic LiveCD as suggested above by D-cat.