Hi,

Im a newbie and after trying to install FC3, which went bad, I was discouraged. I turned to Ubuntu and all it took was one shot and boom! I got a whole new operating system! Very nice. Painless installation.

First off, how do I configure my wireless or how can I get the drivers? Could you provide a link if possible? Please note, in network setup it can identify my address and it is listed as active, but I cannot get online - it says disconnected.

Second, the system seems somewhat sluggish when opening applications or closing them. Im coming from Vindoze and I am wondering if what Im experiencing is normal.

Third, does Linux create the swap drive automatically, or do I have to do that? I wish to transfer certain files from Vindoze to Ubuntu and toy with them there.

Fourth, can you provide a link for commands and information pertaining to toying wth the OS? I wish to explore the system, disect, and possibly improve it while developing positive attributes.

Fifth, which compiler are you using for developing.. I like DevC++, is it compatible? Any pages you can link to pertaining to this area?

Im so siked I finally installed a working Linux distro and I just wanna have more fun! Ive been trying for months so this is a big accomplishment for me even though it was a snap and maybe Ubuntu is made that way.. don't care.. now on the next stage.

Thank you

Hi JujitsuFreak!

I would highly recommend you taking a look in this link. It's an unofficial Ubuntu guide, and has a lot of tips and tricks:

http://www.ubuntuguide.org/

Bookmark it . I have no previous experience with wireless LAN, but I've found this:

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/WiFiHowto

Yes and no. If you've chosen the default partition method during the installation process, then you have swap. If you did your partition manually, you've to create a partition of type swap. Otherwise you are running without any swap and that would explain why you system is slow. It's recommended to create a swap partition with double the size of your physical RAM. This is arguable, however, but it's acceptable .

You could, however, create swap afterward the installation if you have some free space. If you don't, you may need to resize a partition. The link I gave you above with Ubuntu's guide suggests gparted, the same could be accomplished with fdisk, however. When you have a swap partition, do:

This assumes that your swap is located at /dev/hda2 (or second partition from your first IDE Harddrive). Needless to say, it can be scareing for a newbie. Best should be to start a fresh install and create your partitions properly if you've missed this step.

Yes and no. Well, the C++ language is an standard. Compilers and libraries are not. In Linux, we use gcc/g++ to compile C/C++ code respectively. It's a command line only tool, unlike DevC. Still, you could find amazing IDE's for Linux, such as Anjuta or Eclipse which are far better then devC in my honest opinion.

I hope it helps.

Good luck!

Excellent!

Just what I needed.

Thank you!

NP, you're welcome

By swap, if you mean a partition so you transfer files from windows to Linux and visa-versa, you need to format a small FAT partition. The FAT filesystem is readable by both windows and Linux.

Linux can read NTFS fine as well.

Regarding the confusion as the purpose of swap space, it is not a place for windows and linux to swap stuff . It's a place for the OS to swap things out of RAM and onto the disk when it needs more RAM but has run out. Doing this a lot slows things down, because the whole purpose of RAM is to be very fast, and writing stuff to the hard drive (where the swap space is located) is relatively slow. If you have a lot of RAM and don't do anything too taxing, you might never swap. I have a gig of RAM and 2 gigs of swap space and both displayed on my gkrellm. I've never seen the swap used at all.

If you want to read files off of a windows drive in linux, just mount the drive properly (see man mount and man fstab) and read away.

By the way the OP used the word "swap", I took it to mean he was looking for a VFAT.