[ILUG] Moving a Windows user to Dapper

[Niall O Broin]

Lacking an Aunt Tilly, I thought instead that I might migrate my  
young bro Mo to Linux from Windows. He would appear to be the perfect  
use case - he uses his PC only for email, web browsing, some Skype  
usage, and Picasa for his pictures, so there's absolutely no problem  
with some killer app. [Oh - he recently bought a Palm Zire Z22. I  
haven't synced any of my Palms to Linux since I started to use an OS- 
X notebook, but it used to work, so I presume there are good enough  
solutions now?]

His PC has been suffering from the usual Windows crap of getting  
slower and slower and doing random things - this despite the fact  
that he uses Firefox rather than IE, and Thunderbird rather than  
Outlook and is careful (he says) to not run random things, including  
random crap sent to him in email.

So, I resized his Windows partition, and installed Dapper with  
Firefox, Thunderbird and Picasa so he has his complete application  
stack - but what about his data?

Thunderbird seems to only be able to import from other mail clients  
on the same box. I can't see any convenient way to import his  
existing email and settings (though I think Thunderbird uses mbox, so  
the email itself should be doable) but what about his folder  
structures, and his settings and preferences?

Picasa has an import option, but again, that seems to not be what I  
want - it is rather to import pictures from somewhere (camera, CD,  
whatever). I'm sure it'd easily install his pictures but again, what  
about his library and his settings and preferences?


I have googled for the above but with not much joy, sadly.



Niall