First time using Ubuntu: General Questions

[sam4037]

Had a quick look from the CD and first impression is good!! Even fast from the CD only!!

Will have to install audio and video and perhaps other drivers to fully experience it though. Did not recognise my display nor audio nor video card. Wubi will come in handy for that I guess.

Also having a quick test in FF I saw that my HOSTS file from XP did render useless, so will also have to check up on that. Don't like ads anywhere online. Would love to be able to copy my FF profile over to Ubuntu somehow, lots of bookmarks, history and tons of add-ons etc. Since I also do audio/image/video editing with Soundbooth/Photoshop etc guess Windows will still be used for that.

But mainly I want to try Ubuntu for rtmpsrv first of all. It looks all so easy here. But I am sure there is much more to it!

On the other hand for my win7 x64 laptop rtmpexplorer will come on handy for sure.

Last not least for my still most known system the xp sp2 I really want to take on the challenge and learn to use rtmpsrv like described here and find rtmpe urls like described here.

Kinda still being flexible with all those, would be wicked to know how to run RTMPDump on Linux as well as on Win7 or XP. Do you mind me sending you a couple of PMs with regards to questions about Ubunut once I fully dive into it? Don't worry it won't be tons of it, and perhaps the Wubi will sort me anyways. Fingers crossed!

"Tools" -> "Firefox Sync" allows to sync everything. You don't even need to use add-ons when you use Firefox 4.

AdBlock for Firefox and Chrome filters ads just fine.
I also used Privoxy in Ubuntu, but had problems with it. Although its filtering ability is amazing.

I don't like WUBI, although the first time I tried Ubuntu was using WUBI. But I do recommend to use dual boot instead.

As for Windows programs like Phososhop, take a look at PlayOnLinux. It allows you to run many Windows applications including MS Office, Photoshop, Autocad,... from Linux.

As for questions, try to post them in the forum whenever possible. PMing won't allow other users to help.

[any ANONYMOUS forum user]

Sure Sync will come in handy, but I specifically wanna use 3.5 on my old old desktop plus all the add-ons, like firebug, nosquint, dta, etc for webdev and so on. Then Adblock is cool and all that but it does not block the ads on the server side but on my side, the client, this makes Adblock a lot more slower than using a HOSTS file where the connection attempt is directly looped to my machine. At least this is what I think it does. Since I use a HOSTS file I surf like 80% faster and only see the site's content and none other, I have come so used to this that when using a foreign machine just for over than 10 min I edit the HOSTS file, lol. Oh an Noscript is essential as well. Never tried FF4 so no idea if that is all intergated. So hope Ubunutu has something similar up its sleeve.

Yes I guess a dual boot will be essential. I have got my XP on 20GB ntfs primary partition, what does Ubuntu need? ntfs and primary partition as well or can it actually be in the same partition as XP?

Got all my data etc external or on other hard drive, learned it the hard way many time, nothing else on my OS partition except the OS, FF and TB are great for that (firefox.exe -p) so that I can keep those profile on another drive to not get thing mucked up.

Lol, I DONT USE MSOFFICE, hello!!! OO all the way, hehe, but yeah for PS and soundbooth I might check out playonlinux, but since I gotten so used to it on XP I might stick with it for now.

Hey this is first of all a starting point for trying rtmpsrv on linux.

So how do I get my m-audio 2496 card installed on linux as well as ma nvidia video card? will the drivers with .exe file name extention work? don't think so.. Lots to learn.

Where do I find out about dualboot? I am also active in reboot.pro, so guess the answers might be there or in some ubuntu forum, if you have some tips, let me know, no need to present the solution on a silver dish, love fiddling with things and learning in the wake of events.

Originally Posted by any ANONYMOUS forum user

Sure Sync will come in handy, but I specifically wanna use 3.5 on my old old desktop plus all the add-ons, like firebug, nosquint, dta, etc for webdev and so on. Then Adblock is cool and all that but it does not block the ads on the server side but on my side, the client, this makes Adblock a lot more slower than using a HOSTS file where the connection attempt is directly looped to my machine. At least this is what I think it does. Since I use a HOSTS file I surf like 80% faster and only see the site's content and none other, I have come so used to this that when using a foreign machine just for over than 10 min I edit the HOSTS file, lol. Oh an Noscript is essential as well. Never tried FF4 so no idea if that is all intergated. So hope Ubunutu has something similar up its sleeve.

You can always set up a firewall to block some IP addresses, I suppose.

As for syncing FF 3 bookmarks, you can use the XMarks add-on. The should be more advanced tools as well.

Originally Posted by any ANONYMOUS forum user

Yes I guess a dual boot will be essential. I have got my XP on 20GB ntfs primary partition, what does Ubuntu need? ntfs and primary partition as well or can it actually be in the same partition as XP?

Where do I find out about dualboot? I am also active in reboot.pro, so guess the answers might be there or in some ubuntu forum, if you have some tips, let me know, no need to present the solution on a silver dish, love fiddling with things and learning in the wake of events.

It is important to read about dual boot when you install Windows from Linux. If you have Windows, then install Ubuntu, it will use the Grub boot loader, so you will be able to choose Windows or Ubuntu at startup.

Ubuntu will need its own partition. Actually I use 3 ones for Ubuntu:
1. A partition for a swap file (slightly larger than the RAM size)
2. An EXT2 partition for Ubuntu OS (/) [I use ~10GB]
3. An EXT2 partition for the documents (/home)

You may use EXT3 or some other file system for Linux as well. I prefer EXT2, since I have less problems accessing such partitions from Windows XP/7 (with third party freeware software).

You can also use one partition for (2) and (3). I did this in the past. But right now I understand how much easier to have the OS on a separate partition - you can format it fast without thinking and have all your data intact.

And I have a bootable flash drive (or CD/DVD) with Ubuntu, so I can use Ubuntu Live in case of boot problems (needed it when installing Windows after Ubuntu).

Make sure to read about partitions Linux like Ubuntu needs. And make sure to select partitions manually during the Ubuntu installation process (to avoid data loss).

Originally Posted by any ANONYMOUS forum user

Got all my data etc external or on other hard drive, learned it the hard way many time, nothing else on my OS partition except the OS, FF and TB are great for that (firefox.exe -p) so that I can keep those profile on another drive to not get thing mucked up.

Chrome and Opera also have sync options. And both are available in Linux as well as in Windows.

Originally Posted by any ANONYMOUS forum user

Lol, I DONT USE MSOFFICE, hello!!! OO all the way, hehe, but yeah for PS and soundbooth I might check out playonlinux, but since I gotten so used to it on XP I might stick with it for now.

MS Office is one of the best applications from MS. I wish I was able to replace it with Open Office (or LibreOffice which I use now instead of OO)

Originally Posted by any ANONYMOUS forum user

So how do I get my m-audio 2496 card installed on linux as well as ma nvidia video card? will the drivers with .exe file name extention work? don't think so.. Lots to learn.

Exe drivers won't work, I suppose. I installed Ubuntu onto 2 desktops and 2 laptops (Sony and HP)... never needed to look for ATI or NVidia drivers as well as sound drivers. It was working out of the box.

But I did install an NVidia driver for Linux as an alternative. I downloaded the Linux driver from the NVidia web-site.