I can strongly advice the use of a usb stick that's readable for data both by windows and linux, and hosts a bootable ubuntu. That's the best of the two worlds imho.
At work, my OS comes from there, and my data get there too. When done, I shut off and put it in my pocket and go home.

See my sig for details

I think its pretty amazing how people are jumping on linux. For instance I'm known in my store as a guru for some reason because i have basic knowledge of whats going on with computers and my co-worker is now trying out Ubuntu also a girl i wanted to talk to(thats a long story lol). I used linux since Redhat dominance days in the 90's even though I'm still young 25* have had a fair share of usage from mandrake before Mandriva, Suse, and all others. Linux is wonderful Chris i would honestly say use a bleeding edge type of Distro after Ubuntu so you can break things and fix it is the only way you will learn more rapidly. Shoot i remember when just getting x to run on non supported hardware and running vesa mode was only option(still love those days of being a underdog). But I'm glad you taking part into learning linux.

I went back to linux a while back after a break of 15 years, and went with linux mint.

My pc had xp installed, and was fully partitioned, I just emptied one of the partitions and the linux installer resized that partition and freed up space to install on. Everything worked straight away. stuff like sharing my printer to windows machines and using my N95 as a modem. All that stuff worked straight away. So I must say I was mightily impressed.

I'm not saying it will work that great for you, but it did for me. Also, my xp installation was unaffected, and works as before.

I definitely recommend reading the links that folks posted about what the various desktop environments available in Linux are.

I figure it might be helpful to you (and hopefully other folks who might be new here and have the same questions) to go over at least my opinion of what all that boils down to.

I will warn you right now that this is much longer than it has a right to be:

Operating Systems which have graphical user interfaces use specific applications to handle that experience. In Windows Vista and 7, that interface is called Aero. Aero is what draws the windows on the screen, puts the minimize and maximize buttons in the corner, and provides the nifty 3d effects that impress accountants when they drag a window around.

Mac OS X uses an interface called Aqua. It does the same thing, it's just a specific interface for Mac OS X.

Linux (and Unix) operating systems by and large use an X server to handle displaying graphics (before X servers, people mostly just used the command line...some of us long for those days). The X server is the software which is actually responsible for translating images on the screen to commands and so forth (this is a bit of a simplification).

In the early days of X servers, each application which wanted to show something had to basically implement everything on it's own. It had to draw the windows, set up the buttons, and so forth. Because of this, applications would look different from one another (and also not be particularly knowledgeable about each other...so drag and drop between windows was out...unlike now...where it works some of the time).

Somebody figured that a raw imaging server was of little utility to end users, so they wrote what was termed a "Window Manager". Basically, a window manager ran on top of the X Server, and would handle how buttons showed up on windows, and how the windows would be dragged around, and so forth. Motiff is an example of an early window manager (it looked awful, but it worked).

Over the years, many other ones came out and some became more popular than others. I myself fell under the sway of the Enlightenment window manager (which I think after 15 years is almost ready to be updated again).

At some point, people realized that in addition to just drawing the windows, it might be nice to have things like a start menu, or a taskbar. Originally, these were just add-on programs you ran in addition to your window manager (assuming you could get everything working...Linux was much less fun in those days).

One of the first projects to try and put all of that together in a cohesive way was KDE. KDE was a desktop environment created by a company called Trolltech (who are now part of Nokia) which contained a window manager, a login manager (the screen you type your name and password into to log into the machine), a taskbar, and so forth. In order to make things easier, they created all of this using a framework which they called Qt. Basically, Qt was a library (or set of libraries) which an application could use so that the developers wouldn't have to worry about all the pain-in-the-***-ness of drawing their own windows and making their own buttons.

One nice side-effect of this was that applications which used Qt would all look familiar, in the way that all Microsoft Windows applications all by and large have the x button in the corner and the minimize and maximize buttons in the same place (disregarding Microsoft's own Windows Media Player, which breaks all of their own interface guidelines).

People across the land were happy about this, as it took some of the drudgery out of GUI application development. However, all was not well in the kingdom...

Trolltech made their own license for the Qt library, which they dual-licensed. As you are probably aware, nothing pisses people off in the open source community more than a new license (except apparently proprietary software).

A competing project was created, basically in an effort to thwart the adoption of KDE as a technology (it wasn't really that malicious, license concerns are a big potential problem for free software). This project was called Gnome.

As the purpose of Gnome was to create a competing desktop environment, they needed their own library. Enter Gtk. Gtk is the Gnome equivalent of Qt. They do the same thing by and large, just in different ways (for what it's worth, Gtk is a C library, and Qt is C++). Again, I'm grossly oversimplifying here, but hopefully you get the picture.

So the arms race had begun, and both projects started working on making their applications useable (to be honest, neither were very good at the beginning).

Back then users were faced with the very real choice of having to decide which environment to use (as at the time, most systems wouldn't run very well with both installed...thankfully modern day systems don't really have that problem).

Fast forward to today, and you find that both projects are pretty much at feature-parity. While there are some underlying differences, at this point in time it really just comes down to preference. Some people prefer Gnome...some prefer KDE. Most modern Linux distributions install both underlying libraries, as lots of applications exist which require one or the other library to work (Firefox, for example, under Linux runs in Gtk).

Now...assuming you're still reading this; what does that mean for the N900?

Maemo supports both Gtk and Qt. Presently, the Hildon framework runs using Gtk. This means that when you get your shiny new N900, the bulk of the applications which ship on it will rely on the underlying Gtk library to handle the buttons and windows and so forth.

From what I've read (and this doesn't seem like a secret at this point), Nokia's plan is to start a migration to using Qt for the Hildon framework. This makes sense for a number of reasons. The stated reasons are that Nokia is hoping that once Symbian (where Nokia makes most of its money) runs Qt (and support for Symbian has recently been released in the Qt 4.6 update), it'll be easier for developers to port applications between Symbian and Maemo (as they'll both use the same windowing library).

I don't actually think it will be all that easy, as to be honest, the non-display aspects of the code will be completely different (assuming a native C++ Symbian application and a Maemo application)...but that's neither here nor there. Really, some applications will be easy to port, others might just as well be started from scratch.

If you are someone who has no foreknowledge of any of these libraries (and most likely if you're still reading this, you might be), the question posited might be: Which library should I use?

The answer is complicated (of course it is). If you are porting an existing application, use whatever it's already written in (don't make more work for yourself). If you're starting from scratch, use whichever one you feel like. Gtk isn't disappearing once Qt support becomes more standard.

I personally prefer Qt. As it's European in origin, it makes me feel more cultured. Actually, it's just that I prefer C++ to C, and I find Qt to make more sense to me logically.

As this is obviously my opinion, I'm sure everyone else here can gladly give you there's. Ultimately, there is no right or wrong decision though. Linux is all about choice (at every level, sometimes to its detriment).

I hope that is moderately helpful.