New to Linux with a lot of questions
 

First of all I'd like to inform all that I am not a willing Windows user since Commodore went out of business, still have my Aamiga 1000 with a 62 meg hard drive with two partitions. That said, I have downloaded and installed Kubuntu 6.0 on an AMD 950 system with 750 kb of ram, an Ati Rage 2000 graphics card, and a Maxtor 6.2 Gig hard drive. The complete hard drive was set up for Linux only and Kubuntu installed without any hitches I think.

My problems:

Less than half the drive was used for the operating system and swap. The remainder of the drive is there and identified but inactive. I don't know how to activate or select the mount point for this partition as I would like to make it Data only.

Second, My Kubuntu download does not have Gimp as part of the package. If I download Gimp, assuming it's a Debian D/L, when it installs, will everything be put in it's correct place or is this something a Linux newbee stays away from?

My primary goal is to get away from MS, scan the family photos, burn DVD's of organized photos, record my old vinyl albums to CD's and run a financial program to handle the family banking, not investments. Oh yea, surf the Web on occasions and check my e-mail.

Any help on this would be appreciated, cause I need a lot more.
:scratch:

what do you mean by saying the drive is inactive? could paste the output of df -H

to install gimp, you could use the command apt-get install gimp
debian packages do work on ubuntu.

First you need to create a mount point - which is a normal folder, usually in the /mnt or /media folder but it can be anywhere that suits you. Make sure it has ownership and permissions set correctly.

You can mount a partition using the sudo mount command, or (more usefully), you can create an entry in /etc/fstab. An entry here can mount a filesystem at startup, or at least make it easier for you to mount it manually (as it can let ordinary users mount a disk, and mean that only the device name or the mount point needs to be specified.

fstab is a plain text file, and so can be edited with any text editor (though you need to gain root privileges for this, using sudo). An entry in fstab has the following format:
<dump> is something to do with backups, but is generally 0, while <fsck> defines the order in which the partitions are checked at startup (0 means they are not). Options for different file systems are given in mount's man page, and more info on fstab can be found on this page

Isn't it available through the synaptic packet manager (I'd be surprised if it wasn't)? You may have to check that the right repositories are selected (the settings menu in synaptic) but it should be in the officially supported repositories. If it is, installing it will be a breeze.

If not, it's available as a .deb package from the Debian website. Clicking on such a package in Firefox, I get offered an option to install automatically, so there shouldn't be a problem.

Well, k3b is the standard for burning CDs and DVDs. Evolution is fine for emails, and there are several web browsers installed as standard (among which, Firerfox), and synaptic lists a personal financial program called grisbi (though I've never used it).

Hope this helps,
Rob

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