Ok, so I just installed Ubuntu Linux, and so far I'm enjoying it quite bit. Fast, user friendly, and so on and so forth.

I installed it with intentions of learning more about Linux, and working with it. So, given this little tidbit of information, I pose this question to you, Linux users of Massassi, any cool sites you'd recommend for learning more about the workings of LInux, or things you recommend learning more about?

take a hammer to your genitals... you'll get the same results only alot faster

It's an exercise in patience. Making drivers work is stupid.

Good luck getting audio or wireless internet to work.

If you need help with something specific to Ubuntu, try this forum.

I've never had an audio problems with Ubuntu. Any broadcom wireless chips are going to give you trouble.

Believe it or not, the audio worked immediately after the first boot. As did my touchpad (it's a laptop) and the volume buttons and such.

As for the wireless I had a few minor hitches, first the driver just needed to be activated (it was available right away, didn't need to contact through a wire, or download drivers from another PC and copy them over) but at first I saw no wireless networks, created my own manual connection which didn't work. Then after I booted up this afternoon it finds all the networks nearby. At first it wouldn't find any after booting, and I'd log out and back in and then they'd show up, but now they just show up.

Got online, updated, then the next thing I know it's finding my nVidia card, and I was able to set it up.

The nVidia X Server settings didn't want to save when I would log off, so I need to look into that, but using the Ubuntu controls let me change the resolution, which is all I needed (I forgot how crappy 800x600 is; ugh)

I never understood this. In the BSD operating systems, these things just work. I guess it helps when your sound system is not ALSA with a terrible audio server tacked on top of it and your kernel does not have multiple, incompatible wireless stacks.

As for learning about Linux, you definitely want to learn the basics of using the command line interface. Even though Ubuntu is pretty user friendly, it always nice to know that you can try and fix your system when something goes horribly wrong (or at least save you files).

I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on my laptop a while back and the audio and wireless worked flawlessly out of the box

7.10 is old enough that audio was actually working. 8.04 is when they switched to PulseAudio, the devastatingly broken human waste byproduct of a pair of neckbeards who didn't think the other three dozen sound servers were good enough. In the Linux world, "works" does not automatically make something better than an alternative that does not.

Wireless working out of the box on "free" Linux is about as likely as winning the lottery. That's what Shuttleworth's millions have paid for: I still remember having to manually **** around with ndiswrapper, extracting firmware from Windows drivers and editing network config files by hand. Linux networking has "improved" but that isn't saying much. I think it's funny that networking has been such a gong show in an operating system that was born from the Internet.

I think Pulseaudio is the biggest culprit here. You tend to hear about the problems more since Ubuntu uses it and lots of people use Ubuntu. I've been using ALSA for years and I've never had a single problem with sound.

I installed windows 7... works out of the box, didn't need to install anything.
Tried Ubuntu and thought it sucked

People always complain windows is bloated, and yet say it's great because it works out of the box. It makes me annoyed.

I never really got the bloated feeling with Windows and this is going back to 3.1

I had tons of problems with xubuntu audio in the past but the latest version seems to have fixed them all for me (latest stable). I don't use wireless and it never has problems with my ethernet card.

Regarding windows vs ubuntu and bloat, ubuntu is complete bloat, it has software for everything in the entire universe installed by default. I used to be pissed when windows started including browser, email client, msn chat client, stupid windows media player (the old one that just played media was great, but now it's a huge bloated piece of crap that runs like complete *** even when I haven't opened a media file), etc. But compared to ubuntu it definitely has a lot less software installed by default.

The other thing is that the installation of windows is just huge, especially considering the amount of software included by default. I don't know anything about windows vista/7, though, maybe they changed it?

I suppose it's ironic then that while my audio never works in Windows XP or 7 and I need to install drivers off of a CD, it works out of the box in Ubuntu.



Yeah, it's even bigger now. XP was on a CD, Vista/7 are on a DVD, and they had to invent a new archive format to make everything fit apparently (well, probably to hold NTFS metadata, most archive formats were invented during the FAT era when all you had were timestamps and 4 bits for archive, hidden, system, and readonly).

Windows install vista and up is so huge because it has a buttload of compatability stuff.

It's odd to me that they can't just have that stuff on the cd and install the drivers when you need them, instead of having it all installed all the time.

The drivers actually don't take up that much space (according to vLite) except for video drivers of course, which they really should include anyway... not sure if they're all installed locally or just the driver for the card you have. I'd go back and check but I'd need to get my Vista DVD out and copy it locally to get vLite to show me the figures.

I hope I didn't give you the impression I was trying to say it was better than any alternative.

After I fooled around with ubuntu for about a week I realized it is pretty much worthless for my needs. Even if it did work flawlessly