Someone gave me an old Dell XP with Windows service pack 2. I spent hours cleaning out unnecessary drivers and upgrading to service pack 3. Then per the wise suggestion of Pinyin Joe pinyingjoe.com I set a system restore point prior to installing Microsoft Asian Language and Google Pinyin. After those installed the machine became VERY unstable so I undid it via the restore point. The restore seemed to work so I left the machine running a virus scan overnight and by morning, the drive was dead. I could not restore Windows to it and I could not install Ubuntu. I walked up the street to J&R Computers (NYC) and bought an identical compatible 320 gig drive for $60 and it works fine. Youtube has HOW-TO tutorials that showed me how to remove the old drive. I installed Ubuntu 10.6 (LTS long term service). Adding Chinese Language fonts and input seems much easier in Ubuntu. I also installed a program called Hanzim which is free and may be found in the Synaptic Manager.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/gutsy/man1/hanzim.1.html

My plan is to take all the Chinese text I have for Rosetta Stone (in Google Documents) and practice typing and memorizing (along with Skritter practice) the characters in Open Office (or Libre.. what do they call it now) on Ubuntu using Ubuntu Pinyin input methods.

I was able to load all the vocabulery into the public vocabularies RSL1, RSL2, RSL3, RSL4, RSL5 (corresponding to the five levels of study) so anyone who is also using Rosetta Stone may avail themselves of this vocabulary aid.

When I first saw the exercises with TWO LINES of Chinese characters for each sentence I was confused because the characters SEEMED to be identical. Later I notices that the second line is Traditional and the first line is Simplified PRC.

Last week I realized that I could not remember the word for NINE. When I looked it up I realized that it looked an aweful lot like the character for DAO in my pocket size Oxford dictionary. Now I see the difference in the curl. In various computer fonts the difference is more noticeable.

I was on Facebook on my Ubuntu and had fun with a friend (who knows no Chinese) by typing some characters I could remember using Ubuntu Pinyin) ... OHHH... I was just about to try out the input here but I am in Chrome browser and I think it only worked for me in Firefox because installing Asian Language automatically installs some plugins to Firefox.