Looked at the similar posts, didn't see what I wanted.

I just made major changes to my machine. New mainboard, processor, memory, p/s, etc. I put Ubuntu latest stable release on. Going to quit windows. Got my SoundBlaster Audigy 2ZS Platinum Pro working well. Now:

How do I add in other peripherals

a tv tuner card
a USB hard drive (AcomData) (with data on it)
a Firewire hard drive (Maxtor OneTouch II) (again with data on it)

How do I get programs I used in Windows working on this install?

Thanks for any help,

Colonel Forbin

First of all, welcome to linux!

Adding the USB and firewire drives won't be a problem. When you plug the drive in, take a look at the output from the dmesg command. On some distros you need to be root to use dmesg. All it will tell you is what the hardware address of the USB or firewire drives is. Chances are good if your machine has IDE drives, then the external drives will be /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda2. Dmesg will tell you where they are. If you have sata drives already in the case, then the external drives will be some letters down. With 1 sata drive in the case, then the externals will become /dev/sdb, 2 satas then the externals are /dev/sdc, so forth and so on. Once the hardware is found, you would mount the drive to a location within the file tree. Might be /mnt/usb and /mnt/firewire, or you might mount it within your home directory, all depends on how you want to do it. There are countless posts here asking about mounting external drives, so search that up. It is also quite possible that Ubuntu will automatically mount these drives, taking all the work away from you and making it automatic. If the drives are formatted with NTFS filesystem, then you can mount them read only, as writing to NTFS is still experimental. Copy the data off, format the drive, to anything else, then copy it back on. They are probably formatted Fat32, which linux can read and write to.

As for windows programs, check out the equivalency list here on LQ - http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/...ndows_software.
If you have to use the actual windows program and not the equivalent, you'll need to use a program called wine, cedega, or crossover office. I haven't used any of them, but may people here use them with mixed results.

I have never used a TV tuner, but I suspect it would be automatically detected during installation, and would just require some software to work.

Peace,
JimBass

TV Tuners unfortunately can be fairly difficult. It took me quite a while to finally get mine working. You're gonna need to post what type of card you're using, etc. There's some cards that work, some cards that don't work, some cards that work with little/no effort, and some that require a lot of "know how" and effort to get to work. Generally, the BT878 chipset should work pretty well. You're likely going to be doing a lot of googling/searching before finally getting it to work.

Getting Windows programs to work, is very hit and miss. Some programs work very well under Wine or Crossover, others don't work at all or are very unstable. You're first goal, should be to look for a Linux application that will do what you want. If that fails, then you can try Wine, if that doesn't work, then you can try Crossover. Crossover isn't free, but it does work quite well. The one or two Windows programs I need, 1 worked fine in Wine, the other just wouldn't work, it crashed, froze, etc. Once I installed the trial version of Crossover, both of the programs worked perfectly under Crossover, so I just bought Crossover.

http://www.winehq.com
http://www.codeweavers.com
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Dapper