Finally i decided to upgrade my operating system from XP Pro to Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft.
It costs nothing, except some time ... but far less than XP & without f*ing up your hard drive.
Wanna try, too?
1. Download the iso-file (choose the desktop version for 386, Mac or AMD64) from one of the ubuntu mirrors. It's almost 700MB, so take your time.
2. Burn the iso-image to a cd of 700MB capacity. You need an iso-burner, don't just copy. Alex Feinman's does it fine! No you have a LiveCd, which allows you to boot up and run your operating system from your CDROM, your hard drive wil not be modified.
3. Boot your machine with the freshly burned CD (don't forget to change the boot sequence in your BIOS!), your hardware will be autodetected and press <Enter> to load the GUI. If it works, you can try all applications coming with the distro, for example switch on your network card, run firefox 2.0 ...
4. Did you like it and wanna see it with full speed, run the install icon and install it to some free space on your hard drive (took me about 15 minutes to finish). A partition manager (Gparted), which is self intuitive will preserve your old OS for dualbooting, except you choose to take over the full drive ...
5. After reboot you'll get a menu to choose for starting Ubuntu or your original OS
Edit: The GRUB bootloader is the thing i always missed with windows
6. Have fun, explore and start fine tuning! Speaking for myself i was really impressed. Did it already on two machines.
Edit:2006-11-10
Meanwhile on 64bit, no rocket sience, but rocket speed.
Question: Would it be possible to compile the HFS sources for Linux? Or do i have to lock up XP in a virtual machine to run HFS from there, i don't want to give it up HFS!