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.
 
Not sure about the power settings... I never bothered with them on my laptop and I am going to assume you are also running the latest version of Ubuntu.

You can access Windows partitions from Ubuntu quite easily. In Feisty Fawn [and I will assume in each release since] you can get the packages you need via the Synaptic Package Manager. Just do a search for ntfs-3g. Once installed I believe it has a nice GUI to find the Windows Partition. There are supposedly risks involved, but I have never had a problem using it. If you are using the latest version, do some reading as it may be something that is pre-installed by now. I have only just started messing around with the latest Ubuntu release so don't know everything new.

Yes, the GUI in Ubuntu is a little chunkier. You can altar this by decreasing the font size - don't do it too much as I recall it could bork parts of the UI.
 
Remember that you have toolbars on the top and bottom by default in Ubuntu so that accounts for squashing everything by 20 or so pixels. Change the system fonts to something you like better. Pretty much all programs obey the system font settings, unlike Windows. I'm quite fond of Google's Android fonts right now. They're compact yet highly readable.

As for the Windows jazz, you should install Windows first, then Ubuntu. Ubuntu'll be able to see the WIndows partition and set up the bootloader to work with both. furthermore you'll have the option of mounting your NTFS partition while you're in Linux. You could then copy stuff over. Yes the vast majority of hardware works out-of-the-box in most Linux distros, unlike Windows. Most people will only need to install one driver, the graphics driver. Even so most cards will work just fine in 2D mode with the drivers that ship with the distro. It's impressive work that the kernel maintainers do to keep everything supported like that. :)
 
battery power displays while its charging (i think) and when discharging.
you can change power settings in system --> preferences --> power management.
 
Rich43 said:
battery power displays while its charging (i think) and when discharging.
you can change power settings in system --> preferences --> power management.
Click to expand...

You could probably add a battery applet via right clicking on the tool bar I reckon.
 
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
 
I am almost certain that WONT be a scsi drive no matter what it's telling you.

It's an old IDE hack to make it use the scsi protocols... Or something along those lines.
 
A few major kernel versions ago, it might have been 2.6.20, I CBA to look it up, they retooled the disk handling. Now almost all IDE-type, including SATA and PATA disks, and SCSI disks are handled by the SCSI bits of the kernel. I can't remember why they changed this bit, but it doesn't cause many problems.

When it identifies your disk as SCSI or calls it /dev/sda instead of /dev/hda, it's not a problem and there's not necessarily anything wrong. :)
 
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?
 
For something that's just temorary there's no reason to have to have a root-owned directory. It's extra typing. :p

Edit the following as it may apply in terms of sharename and passwords, etc.
mkdir ~/Desktop/share
sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.0.61/wallpaper ~/Desktop/share -o username="dist",password="btiroxx0rzmesoxx0rz",iocharset=utf8,rw,noperm

The syntax is mount -t cifs (the type of file system you're mounting) //host/share /mount/location/on/your/linux/machine -o (for password-protected shares),(characterset, leaving this out just uses the default), (read/write), permissions

You can figure that out. :)

There are other ways of doing this too. If it were me I'd use pscp on the Windows rig and send it all over an SSH link. I'm nuts like that.

EDIT: You might need to
sudo aptitude install smbfs
first, I can't remember if it's installed by default or not.
 
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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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Ok, I vote that we quit beating the dead horse and just do something else. :p

Run
sudo aptitude install ssh
since you'll need the ssh server to be running for this. Yes, both commands have the same result.

Go to your Windows box and download pscp (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html). This is a Windows clone of the scp tool found on your Linux box. Open the command prompt (Win key + R, cmd, enter) and cd to the directory where you saved pscp.exe. Run it with the syntax
pscp.exe -r C:\path\to\wallpapers [email protected]:~/path/where/you/want/to/save/them/

Hit enter, it'll ask you for your password, and will copy it over.

If you just double click the pscp executable it won't do anything. You have to run it from the command prompt.
 
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.
 
Those are all updates for stuff you already have. If you run the update from the command line (sudo aptitude upgrade) it'll tell you how much disk space will be used. Usually a bunch of updates like that will use something like 20 MiB more space than the stuff it replaces. Sometimes the new versions of stuff are smaller than the stuff it replaces. It won't fill your system with useless cruft. If it does you can run the cruft remover tool! :p

Update without worry. Most updates are just a few kiB more or less than the old stuff. :)

EDIT: Ubuntu is based off of Debian so when the Debian guys fix a problem it will often filter down to Ubuntu with minimal changes.
 
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 :)
 
The opposite of the mount command is umount, not unmount. Similarly the opposite of zip is uzip, not unzip. Many commend-line tools will follow this convention. Some do not, which sucks.

Let's say your share is mounted at /media/disk. You'd unmount it with
sudo umount /media/disk

If your shortcut buttons don't work out-of-the-box (which mine always seem to do ;)) you need to look for solutions people have generated with your specific hardware. The solution for a Dell might not be the same as for a Lenovo.
 
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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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