My Ubuntu notes

My first Ubuntu notes (some of the notes are obsolete now) - covers the following topics:

• Configuring WEP for special needs in wireless configuration
• Configuring GRUB boot loader
• Installing required compilers for not pre-built installation packages (outdated?)
  
• Installing SAMBA the complete file sharing solution (basic guide)
• Changing default sound card (if you have two sound cards)
• Running RealVNC Enterprise Server (not required if you use built in Desktop sharing)
• Installing Adobe Flash Player to Firefox (obsolete) - works from FF now
• Installing Automatix2 with Apt (forgot why I needed it, but there it is :P)
• Installing Avant Window Navigator (I dont use it anymore)

The PDF can be found here. I also had a HOW TO for joining windows domain, but you can do the same with a tool called Likewise and for professional needs, you will have to dig in yourself.

Ubuntu

I've been using Ubuntu for about a year now and I thought I may post some of my expirience with Linux enviroment to all of you who might be interested in giving it a go.

It's really kind of hard to start now, since I don't know where to begin :) The general idea is for me to use this blog as a tool for keeping all the interesting stuff I learn for future use -and for you to use (if you find it useful, that is).

Why Ubuntu? My first encounter with Linux was way back in 2002 I belive with SuSE Linux 8.0, that just shipped out that year. I was eager enough to buy it -but didn't really use it that much. For me, that was the best distribution prior to Ubuntu. Actually it was preconfigured with Wine and it was capable of running some Windows applications and all the rest was pretty neat too. But that was about it for Linux. I did try to setup some virtual machine's with diffrent distros but nothing was any good for me really.

2007 was full of strange new stuff and we were test drving Windows Vista at work, but the new OS from Microsoft was a disaster. Actually when I started the system my disk was constantly loading, even after shutting down some indexing services as I Googled for help. Eventually we reverted back to XP, but I made a dual boot with Ubuntu 7.04. It was nice, but still I had many issues with it and was not really useful.

2008 started with all my machines dual booting to Ubuntu. I had fixed many many minor issues and there was only little things I was missing from Windows at that point. When you change your operating system enviroment, there really is a need for you to decide which applications are mandatory to have, which are good to have and what are the things you can live without on your computer.

If someone will tell you everything works, well it's not true. While most of the things may work for me, this may not be so for you. There are many custom applications only for Windows, that wont run in Wine and if you can't live without them then you'll either:

• have to try and make them work yourself (lets say some preference tuning, source compiling, etc.)

• find a similar application for Linux

• either virtualize it (run in Virtual machine enviroment) or dual boot it

Well this is about my Linux background, I'm a computer science engineer by profession, but most things are made simple now days and anyone can manage them with the help of Google, reading some documentation and of course experimentig :)