Installed Kubuntu. Now what?

[SuperAntMD]

Hi all,
Don't give up on me yet. Still got good 'ol kubuntu on the machine, was just thinking about dual booting windows (seems strange: i used to think about dual booting linux ). At the moment my biggest problem is a cap that was severely depleted and which I needed to preserve to the end of the month.

Thanks for all the advice so far. To answer koffiejunkie and others questions: I don't really have a specific purpose in mind, i just want to be (almost) as comfortable with linux as I am with windows. I was looking more for a tutorial or something to get me going, but I suppose I'll just play around with it and deal with each problem as it arrises until I get the hang of it. It doesn't seem to bad, but from all the hype surrounding linux/ubuntu lately I thought it would be a bit more polished and intuitive.

It is basically just a spare machine, should i consider setting it up as a home server? What exactly would I use that for? Feel free to go wild with any and all suggestions otherwise I might eventually just give it to a charity or something.

 

[koffiejunkie]

HvRooyen: Sadly, the newest kick@ss notebooks are hardly ever well supported. In part because mostly the opensource devs can't afford them and in part because the people who make these gorgeous devices don't do their bit to add support. Send them a nice and polite letter (I'm not being sarcastic) expressing your heartache and disappointment at their prized hardware's performance under linux and their poor support for it. Even if they don't reply, if enough people keep it up, they'll start supporting it. Worked with Dell...

About the fans. That's another unfortunate thing. As if ACPI in general isn't bad enough (My HP's ACPI doesn't even work properly under Windows, even after a year and a half worth of updates), a lot of manufacturers put out buggy ACPI implementations - or rather a buggy DSDT - and then fix it via the windows drivers, while they could just release a BIOS update to fix it. And then they remain tight lipped over how to fix it (while the DSDT is something you can see from the OS in any case, so there are no secrets in there). There was a kernel bug listed for the my notebook for precisely this, and they only managed to fix it properly in kernel 2.6.21.

Anyway, I've found that SUSE generally has the best ACPI of all distros. I'm not sure how, but they manage it somehow.

 

[koffiejunkie]

SuperAntMD, Kubuntu isn't quite as polished as Ubuntu, but the beauty is skin deep and I find KDE a much more productive environment to work in. Different strokes for different folks, but there are some things in Gnome that are just stupid and awkward to use, like the open/save dialogs and that hideous file browser. If you do any serious file sorting/renaming, you'll see the difference.

As for what you can do with it, I'm not big on the home server idea, but I have used an Ubuntu box before, really just for my house mates who didn't have computers of their own to check their mail, browse the net and chat to their overseas relatives via Skype. But one of my housemates ran her own one-woman business from home, on an old Mac, and to give her some extra IT infrastructure, I setup a few things on the Ubuntu box - squid for a web proxy, postfix for sending mail (handles outgoing mail over dodgy iBurst far better than old Entourage), Netatalk for file sharing so she can make backups to it, LAMP environment to test websites under development, etc and I setup the wireless card to act as a wireless accesspoint before I had my Netgear.

There is so much more you can do. If you're a gamer, you can run some game servers (I'm thinking Quake3 but it's been a long time since I gamed properly...), if you have a supported TV card, and feel like some serious tinkering, you can play around with MythTV to make your own Tivo style box, if you feel like some more tinkering you can play with Asterisk. I have very little experience with it, but I know you can make a serious voip router out of it, hook it up to various international calling services, and have it use the best account for the number you're dialling (least cost routing).

 

[HvRooyen]

Hi all,

It is basically just a spare machine, should i consider setting it up as a home server? What exactly would I use that for? Feel free to go wild with any and all suggestions otherwise I might eventually just give it to a charity or something.

Firewall, Proxy server, NAS, VPN server (!!!), Internal mail server (with / without antivirus).

I ended up upgrading that machine with extra hard drives - got all the above and more for the price of a dedicated NAS anywhere else. Can now backup everything there, and access it remotely.