NickJones, Ubuntu does have NTFS support out of the box (at least since Intrepid, it didn't in Hardy and previous), but not all Linux distros do. Fedora 10 is one of those disros that does not support NTFS formatting out of the box. What you have to do is install "ntfs-3g" apparently the command
line installer in Fedora is yum so you have to open the
terminal and run the following command (without the quotes) with super user (or root) access:
"yum install ntfs-3g"
That will install the necessary drivers to read NTFS formatting. There are several ways to get root access. Because it sounds like you are not an especially experienced Linux user I would suggest adding "sudo " in front of the command so it reads:
"sudo yum install ntfs-3g"
Then it will prompt for your administrative password, and allow you to install the program. Alternately your first command in the
terminal could be:
"su -"
It would ask you for your password and the preceding "sudo" would be unnecessary. The difference is the "su -" gives you root access for the whole
terminal session. If you open the
terminal to install that program and then close it afterwards it doesn't matter, but if you are going to use the
terminal session to do other things then if you use "su -" you are running the risk of modifying things that you don't want modified. This is one of the big security advantages of Linux that it has this root access protection and one of the reasons it is so hard to write viruses and such for. It can be a pain to type "sudo ...." a million times, but it is certainly worth it if you aren't absolutely sure what you are doing.
As a side note all Fedora specific information came from the Unofficial Fedora FAQ, you might check it out at
http://www.fedorafaq.org it looks like a good jumping
point.
One last note, you can always change the OS on any computer, especially if you're talking about Linux. It's just a matter of how much work you want to put into it (mainly in file backup and learning new programs)