I have Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid installed through wubi on my laptop (it came with Windows 7 preinstalled). This was my first foray into Linux, and I'm here to stay. I have no use for Windows, and yet I must manually choose not to boot into it!

Should I shrink the Windows partition to something negligible and grow the Linux one using something like gparted or fdisk, and just be content that everything runs? In that case, I need to understand the filesystems. Which is which?

Here's the output of $ df -h:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/loop0             17G   11G  4.5G  71% /
none                  1.8G  300K  1.8G   1% /dev
none                  1.8G  376K  1.8G   1% /dev/shm
none                  1.8G  316K  1.8G   1% /var/run
none                  1.8G     0  1.8G   0% /var/lock
none                  1.8G     0  1.8G   0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sda3             290G   50G  240G  18% /host

I would prefer to start over with a clean install of 10.10 Maverick, but I fear what I may lose. Certainly, I will backup my home directory tree (gzip?), but what about various pieces of software that I've acquired from the repositories? Can I keep a record of them?

By the way, I asked a similar question over on Ubuntu forums.