1) I need a replacement for MS Money. GNUCash seems to be the appl for the job. Has anyone used it or any other that can be recommend?
While GnuCash is OK, and I use it myself, it has a number of flaws. It is ok for tracking how much you spend but has no built-in budgeting feature. They also started putting in small business features but in a fairly half arse way. The reporting also leaves something to be desired. Supposedly you can create some fairly sophisticated things if you learn the scheme based reporting language. I'd rather just have a decent GUI. :) I've had a little experience with Moneydance on MacOS X and it seems a little more polished. It is shareware though so you have to pay for it. It is written in Java but performs fine on modest hardware.
2) Currently we access multiple (pop3) mailboxes. Since, Linux maintains strong user security, I am unsure which strategy to follow: a) Configure one user specifically for the mail. b) Share the mail between multiple users (shared single db) c) Other ??? I am also not sure which email appl to use. Evolution seems fully loaded with features, but would thunderbird be better? We also have about 3 years worth of archived mail which must be imported (from MS Outlook).
I'm not sure I follow why you're confused. Or rather your confusion has confused me. A) If you have multiple house members who want to use the computer and each has their own email address and pop3 mailbox then setup multiple user accounts/home directories on the computer. That way each household member can have their own desktop preferences, mail client preferences, cookies, bookmarks etc. Each user can use whatever browser or email client they prefer. I personally use Evolution 2.2 for mail (all IMAP), contacts & calendars and Firefox for web browsing. B). If you have only 1 household member who wants to use the PC regularly but have multiple mailboxes (perhaps one for business and another for pleasure) then I suggest you use Thunderbird if you want the mail client to keep the separate mailboxes apart. If you don't mind all mail from all POP3 mailboxes being dumped into one Inbox then you can use Evolution (or Thunderbird as it is more flexible with respects to POP3 mailboxes than Evo).
3) I would like to setup internet sharing from the Ubuntu box and I cannot find an easy (GUI) sharing option. I could probably do this 'manually', but would like to know if there is any way this can be achieved for non-techies.
Not familiar with Ubuntu so I don't know if there is a user-oriented "GUI" option for Internet Connection Sharing. I'm pretty sure RedHat/Fedora doesn't have one either. Which is a startling oversight if ever I saw one. I guess I'm too used to "going to the commandline" to thing of that. First you need to set "net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1" in /etc/sysctl.conf and run 'sysctl -p' as root to turn on the kernel IP packet forwarding support. You then need to tell iptables to masqurade packets coming in and out of your LAN. This can be as simple as: iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -p tcp -j ACCEPT iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp0 -p tcp -j ACCEPT iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -p tcp -j MASQUERADE Where eth0 is your LAN Ethernet card and ppp0 is your Internet connection. But really this should only be done in the context of a complete firewall setup. The above is very open. I suggest you look for good advice on building/configuring an iptables firewall on the net. There is probably already good info on the WLUG website/wiki. There are some simple and some sophisticated GUI tools out there that will help. Eg, Firewall Builder (www.fwbuilder.org).
4) How do I reconfigure X, to use a different video card?
Do you wish to change the video card in your computer? I'm afraid I don't know how Ubuntu handles hardware auto-configuration. The vast majority of modern distros do a very good job of auto-detecting video card changes and modifying X's settings automatically on boot.
5) Winmodems <sigh> is there any hope? Many people with whom I have come into contact would love to try/switch to Linux. The problem is that many have winmodems (myself included, fortunately I also have an USRobotics external that came to my rescue). Is there anything that can be done? (easily, that is)
Some Winmodems are reasonably well supported. Check out http://www.linmodems.org. Also see http://www.wlug.org.nz/WinModem for more advice. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com