Today the last hurdle that I faced that required my using Windows was removed.
I got my video camera to be recognized on Ubuntu 7.04 via a Firewire port. One of the things that is apparent to me as a non techie user of Linux is how things have gradually got better and easier over the last 5-6 years. Of course - everything that I am doing now was possible at that time - but I had insurmountable hardware and software (driver) obstacles against doing that. At one stage I could only read USB drives after manually loading the usb module. It took me years to get a scanner to work under linux - and that too after a great deal of research and tweaking. Those problems are now history - and after today's success - I realise that in 2-3 years time - when there is pressure to change to Vista - I will not have to do that for the work I like to do. In fact I wrote a few weeks ago about the need for reinstalling all the Windows apps on my new dual-boot drive, As a matter of fact I have installed nothing other than the basic XP install and I have spent over 99% of the time using Linux - especially since Samba is working like a dream and I figured out how to mount an NTFS partition (that I deliberately created just to see what I could do with it) shiv
