Basic ubuntu questions

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Soldato
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After having trouble with windows XP i decided now would be a great time to try linux (again), but this time properly and not in a virtual machine environment (which had awful performance, simply having vmware installed slowed down my xp boot time). After putting ubuntu on a usb drive and installing off that i have noticed i am going to need a few things.

First off, i noticed that by default there are power settings for when connected to AC and when on battery, but is there any way i can have some sort of display showing my current battery status, because so far nothing like that has shown up (although perhaps thats because i have been running on AC the whole time, i dont know).

Secondly, i have a clean install of XP pro as well (im hoping a clean install will be a bit better then my bloated old default lenovo install), the problem is that doesn't have any drivers so i would like to somehow create a folder on my ubuntu desktop that goes to my XP partition, so i can download drivers with ubuntu (which came with enough drivers for networking to work, and so connect to the net), and then open that folder and do a simple drag and drop, so when i load XP the drivers are there ready for me to use.

Finaly, is it just me or is everything in ubuntu 'bigger'? I'm running at the same resolution as my XP install, but things like the firefox window, and the text inside it just look bigger, it feels as if i am running at a lower resolution or something, yet the resolution is correct. Maybe its all just in my mind or something, but it does feel like that.
 
Well i have managed to mount my NTFS partition, wasn't too difficult. And as for the battery monitor, as soon as i unplugged the AC power, the battery monitor came up which solves that problem.

My only issue now is trying to find out my system hardware. I'm not exactly sure which version of the R61 series thinkpad i have, so i need a way of finding what hardware components (such as network adapters) i have so i know what drivers to download for my windows partition. After just browsing through some of the system monitors and such i did find to my surprise that my thinkpad has an SCSI HDD, i was expecting SATA, which i guess is why by default my XP installation CD couldn't detect the HDD untill i put it into compatibility mode in the BIOS.

So far i do seem to be enjoying Linux, i havn't done much yet, but simply learning all these things, encountering challanges and solving them is quite fun :D
 
Things are going good so far, i know my hardware now and i can put files onto my windows partition. Thanks for the help so far, but i still need some more (thanks for sticking with me, i know these newbie questions could be a bit annoying but im sure i will be able to sort myself out once i get these basics down).

Basicaly what i want to do now is to simply transfer files from a shared folder on my PC (running vista), to my laptop, just folder full of desktop wallpapers.

Ive tried a couple things, one said i can simply do smb://192.168.0.61/wallpaper but that came up with no such file or directory. Next i tried sudo mount //192.168.0.61/wallpaper /home/dist/Pictures/Wallpaper/ (i created that directory using mkdir then chown as only root could use it at first), but got the error 'mount error 6 = no such device or address'

I can ping that IP fine, but its not showing up on the network at all. If i open the network > windows network > the only thing listed is 'HOME', inside which is an old laptop running windows 98, my vista machine is on the workgroup 'WORKGROUP', which is not being shown. Could this be why i get a no such directory error when trying to mount?
 
I have typed it exactly like you did and i still get a mount error 6 = no such device or address.

Ive already installed smbfs (although the guide i read said use sudo apt-get install smbfs, im guessing the end result is the same as your command though).
 
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Well after doing all these commands and such its finaly done, i now have all my desktop wallpapers safely on my laptop :D Thankyou for all your help BillytheImpaler.

My final question(for now) is regarding the update manager, i gave it a quick run and did a check just incase new things came out that are not included in the latest ubuntu release, turns out there are 150 updates. Should i download all of these? because i notice some of them like 'base-files' mention Debian, and i dont know if all of these updates are updates to stuff i already have, or updates that may be for other programs too, even ones i dont have. I ask because i dont want to start filling my new linux install with tons of rubish and bloat it out till its as slow as windows, if on the other hand these are updates to things already on my system, then i will download them.
 
Sorry for yet more simple questions, i tried to use #ubuntu on freenode but either none could help, or i was just ignored by everyone.

I recently copied my music collection from my pc to my laptop by mounting my PCs shared folder, the problem came after that. Once i had finished i tried to find out how to unmount the folder, and after searching on the ubuntu site there seem to have been 2 methods, the most common mentioned method would be to use 'unmount', the problem is, when i try that command it says command not found so that wasn't helpfull. The other mention of unmounting i found involved editing some files, which is a little beyond me with my current ubuntu knowledge.

Even though i want to try to learn to use the console properly, i had to shut down my laptop so i decided to try the easy route and just right click the mounted folder that showed up on my laptop and clicked unmount, but even that came up with an error. It mentioned something about the mount not being in a file (fstab or something), and not having root access anyway (it never asked me for my root password, and i am not sure how to log on specificaly as root).

In the end i just had to shut down my laptop, but the problem is that because i had the shared folder still mounted, the shutdown process took a long time, mentioning something about the connection timing out or some such thing. It endec up taking over a min to shut down, when it normaly takes just seconds.

Although when i booted back up the mount has now gone, i want to know how to properly unmount so that i know how to do it the next time i have to mount something.

Lastly, does anyone know of any program that will allow me to use some of my extra laptop keys in ubuntu (forward/back buttons, thinkvantage button (but customizing it do do something else, like open console) or the key combos like fn + home for brightness up). In the synaptic package manager i found something called 'tpb', which sounds like it could do what i want but the problem is when i marked it for installation it says that hotkey-setup and ubuntu-desktop will be removed, which i think its a bad thing.

Edit: Just noticed how long my post is, to anyone who spent the time reading it all i thank you, have a free cookie :)
 
How stupid of me, i kept reading the command as unmount. I can't blieve i didn't notice that it was umount and not unmount. Thats that sorted then :)

Hopefully with the popularity of thinkpads there should be some program somewhere that will give me the functionality i need. Do i have to find a program that is designed for Ubuntu, or can i search any linux site for a program?
 
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