Given the number of posts in the thread on Ubuntu CDs and that the questions have already started popping up, I thought I might give a few of my insights on the last six months of Linux/Unix use, and you might like to add your own knowledge.
Granted, I did not go into Linux completely blind, I had read "The Art Of Unix Programming" by Eric S. Raymond, which is quite a lengthy book, but is fantastic even if you're not a programmer. It introduces ideas and thought processes that are useful in constructing any complex system. The book is available in Eric's writings,
here. We had also used some Unix in second year, in a subject called "Programming for Mathematicians", but we only wrote C text files, compiled them, ran them, and printed the program and output.
After my first Linux installation, running Windows seemed to break Linux. Worse than this, it messed up the identifier on the disk I had Linux installed on, so grub wouldn't even boot. I did recover from this, using Adrian15's
Super Grub Disk. It has a long list of features and is very easy to use [GUI!], and now I always carry one around [not that I've needed it since
].
If you're installing both Linux and Windows from scratch, use Windows to set up your Linux partition as FAT. This makes it easier to get the operating systems working together and to exchange data. Make the FAT partition fat enough to hold all your files [mp3s, etc], which will make using data between the operating systems seamless. [or, you can set up /home to be FAT, if you're more technically minded.] Otherwise, [or if you need the more advanced recovery power of EXT3], you can use
ext2fs or
ext2ifs in Windows and
ntfs-3g in Linux, though ntfs-3g is somewhat experimental. Note that Linux will probably never officially support NTFS as it is not a published, unhindered standard.
Getting help in Linux is easy. Since you're Ubuntu users, there's documentation for most tasks
here, and if that fails you, try IRC. If you don't have an IRC program installed, I recommend xchat, which should be available in your package manager, or with sudo apt-get install xchat. Then login with server = irc.freenode.net, and type "/join #ubuntu". They are pretty friendly on there, so don't be scared if you've got something you can't work out. Note, you should always check manuals first. Simple manuals which can be useful can usually be shown by typing "man <program>" into a terminal. These ones typically explain available options and syntax. If that fails, try "<program> -h" or "<program> --help" or "<program> -?" straight into the terminal. If your problem is solved in one of these, you may be told to RTFM when asking your question.
Where are my drives?! In Linux, IDE drives are named /dev/hd*, with a trailing letter indicating the IDE device, and a further trailing number indicating a partition, 1-4 for real partitions and 5+ for logical partitions. So if Windows is on the first partition on the first disk, it will be on /dev/hda0. You should be able to mount it with "mount /dev/hda0" [if this fails, man mount will give you clues as to what to do. No sexual activity is required]. SCSI and USB drives are named as /dev/sd*. After mounting, you can usually access them from your desktop, or as /media/cdrom0 for example from the command line.
System wide config files are [usually] in /etc, and personal config files in /usr/etc. Some personal config files I've found in /home/username/.<programname>, too [. files and directories are hidden, though you can display them easily enough in nautilus that I'm not going to tell you how
]
That's about all I can think of, other than again stressing the power of google, man and irc to find you what you need. Anything else?
