ADN

I had an old 20GB HDD kicking around so I threw it in (wired up some switches so I can select which HDD I want to boot from at startup) and installed Ubuntu on it using the Live disk.

Installed no problemo. It said a whole heap of updates were available - 164MB worth. Didn't know what I needed so I just clicked the lot. Anyways that all seemed to work.

The internet works (DHCP). I use a Billion ADSL 2+ router with only NAT enabled - thought I'd check www.grc.com (ShieldsUp port test) and found everything was stealth automatically. Very nice. Must have some inbuilt firewall. Haven't figured this out yet.

Anyways.. Onto important matters - Games.

Going to try and get things working. Quake 4, UT2004 and the Prey demo for starters. Q4 and UT2004 support Linux natively. I've installed WINE for Prey.

Just gotta get the time now to install the games and test them. Also have to see about installing the Nvidia graphics driver somehow. Haven't figured this out yet.

So far I'm liking this - stuff just works and answers to most questions seem only a Google search away. If I can get my games to work, I have no further use for Micro$oft anymore.

That's teh point I hope to get to...As soon, and I mean as SOON as I get my desktop built, I may go full out Linux...

nog, and run windows in vmware when you abolutely have to

IE with ActiveX is 'supposed' to work in WINE, haven't got it work properly though..

And for the nvidia graphics driver, just open a terminal and type
CODEsudo apt-get install nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel-common

sudo nvidia-glx-config enable

And restart..!
You'll probably also want to enable the extra software repositories before attempting to install the drivers though (http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Dapper#How_ ... positories).

This can also be achived by installing Automatix (see previous page) instead (much easier).

Yeah I have VPN software (Windows only) and a web-browser based program that requires Active X (why they couldn't program it in Java or something cross platform I don't know) that I'm going to try to get working in a VMWare Virtual Machine.

Thanks for this tip: sudo nvidia-glx-config enable

I'll have to try it and see what it does.

I used the apget tool thingo in Admin to get the Nvidia driver and something downloaded but nothing happened. Now some of you Linux guys might laugh at that but I spent ages trying to figure out where the Nvidia driver and its option were installed to. If I type in the sudo line above hopefully the driver should then be usable?

This right now is what I'm finding somewhat frustrating about Linux - installing stuff. I only have experience with Windows and really haven't done any reading/fiddling with Linux at all until now.

A further example: I tried to install a login client for a cable modem I have and I need to modify a file and it tells me I don't have permission to change the file - huh? Even if I could change the file I can't find the executable (BPALogin) to run. Kinda unnecessarily complicated in my opinion.

And where do you save files to - i.e. is there a My Documents equivalent in Linux?

I'm still keen to get this all working. Don't know that I'm ready to abandon Windows yet though.

installing software was one of the things I struggled with quite a bit also. the installers and scripts like automatix(thanks again for this tip who.am.i) are making it easier though. I am still trying to get a handle on the filesystem conventions like what goes where and where to start looking for a certain file. one command that has helped me immensly is: locate. at a shell prompt type locate filename and hit enter and it will spew out a list of any file with filename as part of its name. wildcards like * work also.

as for My Documents location, there is a folder in root dir called home that has a directory for each user, this is your mydocuments folder and anytime you are in a filemanager window, clicking the home icon takes you here. also, any files or folders that have a name starting with a . (period) will not be displayed in a filemanager window by default.

good luck

Ahaaa. Thanks. I'll figure linux out sooner or later /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />