Which Linux

Just come across something funny as I've gone back on to ubuntu that I installed a few weeks ago. Opening up the CPod website using Firefox on ubuntu, my avatar is either not showing on the conversation page, or it's showing my old avatar [the one before the current one]. I thought the avatars were uploaded onto the CPod website. I can't work out how this has come about. Any ideas? Does it see me as a different user because it's on a different drive? hehe, talk about mpd. It's no big deal of course, but I am curious. In a side note, originally when you changed your avatar on one Praxis site, it changed them across all sites, but this hasn't happened for some time. That is not so mysterious though.

Will this be your first steps into the Linux world? If so, Ubuntu is a safe bet. It is probably the most user friendly of the bunch. They just had a an ovehall of the UI and it's navigation concepts in the last release. I personally liked it but it does not feel finished yet. Other good distro's would be OpenSuse, Fedora and Mandriva.

As for IME's, Mark is right, the default ones work fine. If you are used to using microsoft IME then be warned, they are a little different. On linux, it does a little less work for you. Which is good in a way because it forces you to be better at character recognition. For example on Windows, you can type a word then press 1,2,3 or 4 for the tones to narrow down the search. The default on Linux would select the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th word in the list.

One nice little thing you can do in Linux which is not possible in Windows is you can have multiple users that all have completely different language locales. What I mean is you can have the UI in English for everyday use on your main user account and then setup a second user with a Chinese UI for practice.

I use Ubuntu, but I didn't look into what IMEs are available, because the default one seems to work pretty well.  Their GUI interface has an item for "keyboard input methods" after a few clicks I was up and typing.