Got my wife on Unbuntu

My wife, Renata, has been complaining more and more that Windows is getting slower and it's a pain downloading and installing anti-virus software all the time. I occasionally tease that I don't have any of these problems, I don't even have an anti-virus installed on my Ubuntu machine.
So finally, this week, she said that she wants to a dual boot machine, like Victor has.
Compounding the issue is that over the past few weeks our Internet provider had been getting slower and slower, of course, making Windows appear even slower than normal.
I downloaded the DVD version of Ubuntu 8.10 which took a week with this slow connection and, of course, it didn't work (I believe her machine does like booting with a DVD). Luckily, some time on Friday our Internet provider fixed their problems and I was able to download the CD version of 8.10 in about 40 minuts.
In the meantime I backed up her machine to my hard drive which was much slower than it should have been (about 8 hours). I need to debug our network to see why we aren't doing 100 Mb/sec like we should be.
When I finally got her machine to boot with the CD and had everything backed up, I found that Ubuntu was unable to partition the hard drive. I ended up going back to Windows, running chkdsk /f and defragmented the drive.
After all that I was able to partition without problems but then it failed to boot into X, ugh. Luckily she wasn't around to see all this... I hit Alt-F1 and looked at the /var/log/Xorg.0.log and saw lots of errors related to her Wacom tablet. I unplugged the tablet and I was finally able to install Ubuntu, whew.

So far, so good. She printed a receipt from a web page, and it just worked! Thank you CUPS.
I plugged in her Wacom tablet, and it worked too! No rebooting or playing with xorg.conf, cool!
She needed Java for a web site, and I installed it remotely from my machine and that worked after she restarted Firefox.

Additional programs I installed for her:
Skype, sun-java6-plugin, qalculate, wine, openoffice.org.l10n-pt-br, r-base-core (R language), unison-gtk, rdiff-backup, Amarok, vlc, and gnome-mplayer

Stuff I installed for me:
ssh, unison-gtk, rdiff-backup, subversion, gnome-vim, ssh, python2.5, python2.5-wxgtk2.8, python2.5-scipy, and ipython.

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