hi linda, i hope you can find your way through all those version of scribus.
as greg told you, you can use scribus on any operating system you want (linux, windwos, mac OS X and many other). i have one thing to add: don't mess with the installed programs in your linux. if it does not work in an easy way just wait for your system administrator (you're lucky! it's your son!) to come back and sort it out for you. as you may experience if you hang around a bit in the scribus community, linux is not only for programmers. but you will need somebody with good software knowledges to help you out, when things don't work the way you think they should. in the meantime, you can try to install scribus 1.3.8 on your windows partition and start to work with it. your son will help you bring your work to the ubuntu partition onces he is back. if you need further help, please (temporarly) join the scribus community by subscribing to our mailing list http://lists.scribus.info/mailman/listinfo/scribus or by talking to us on irc http://www.scribus.net/irc just be patient: it may take up to an hour to get an answer... but it may also come after few seconds) as you may have noticed, the community is quite responsive (well not at every hour of the day...) and you will get some precious help. we may even give you a step by step description and get scribus 1.3.8 in your ubuntu box! have a nice day a.l.e
