First of all you can get UBUNTU 8.04 free, not even postage but it does take a
little while.

The second thing is, hope you don't use dial-up Internet because 8.04 left out
the "Activate & Deactivate" function. After a number of people tried to help me
I had to go back to v6.06 which does have it.

In reference to the comment about the repos for 6.10 being unavailable - why ?
Why in the world would anyone want to force people to upgrade? Sounds like
something Microsoft would do! I'm running v6.06 and have installed some packages
so not all are gone.