My Ubuntu Experience: 1 Month Anniversary

I have been using Ubuntu on my desktop workstation for one monthly already! I still can't kick the habit of booting to Windows from time to time (See reasons mentioned later) but that's something I'm determine to avoid doing (Ever since I got Frethog and removed it, my anti-virus keeps finding worms, e.g. Winko/auto.exe, which seems to come from the usual suspect, judging by the fact that a number of posts analyzing these worms were written by Chinese experts. Anyway, I digressed)

Let me summarize a few more things I was able to do on Ubuntu successfully since last time:
1) Burn music CD from MP3: simply use Applications -> Sound & Video -> Serpentine. Works like a charm.

2) Remote Login to Windows. Yes I know there is RDP for Linux but my remote server runs TightVNC. There is no native TightVNC client on Linux but the Java Applet TightVNC Viewer does the job.

3) Mount Windows NTFS directories in Read/Write mode: they are mounted as Read-only by default. The easiest way to mount them as Read/Write is using NTFS Configuration Tool.

4) Mount remote directories in Read/Write mode: if you setup Windows to share a directory on the network, it is accessible using SMB on Linux. These are the steps to mount them permanently and read/writable (Note: VLC could only play remote files on the LAN this way)

Not so successful:
1) SlingPlayer on Wine (link to WineHQ): the sound gets choppy when I work on other windows and the video is grainy as the video tuning wizard refuse to run.

2) VMWare: I ran the free VMWare Converter to create an image of my existing Windows installation but VMWare Server had problem running this image (got a black screen after starting momentarily and then it just quit)

In any case, for day to day web browsing/blogging/e-mail/office app, Ubuntu has done a pretty good job. I heard some people commented that Ubuntu's "budding" relationship with Dell is not very dissimilar to that of Microsoft and IBM and other early PC clone manufacturer! I am not sure if that is a positive comment.

[Update: I ran into this bug (and the solution provided in the same link worked for me) for my SMB mount. An example of STOP_SERVICE line looks like this:
STOP_SERVICES="mysql samba-shares "
(modified from the mysql only line)
]