I'm new to the forums, so I please pardon my long winded post.

I've dabbled in Linux for a great many years, but only recently got serious with it while tinkering with my 3 Raspberry Pi's. I have great plans for them, but they're not why I'm here.

While tinkering with the Pi's I figured I needed to devote more time to Linux on a box I could do development on (the Pi is a bit too slow for that, at least for me). So I bought myself a nice, new shiny system based on the Intel Core i5-3570K with HD4000 graphics (16GB of RAM, 10K HDD). I installed Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit (will soon upgrade to 12.10) and started getting my feet wet all over again.

I'll confess that I'm mostly a Windows guy that develops software using Delphi, SQL Server, and more recently Python. I've learned my way around a command line with the Pi's and Raspbian (which is based on Debian). So, I hoping at least some of this knowledge will carry over to Ubuntu.

I'm working my way around the interface in Ubuntu and figuring things out. Hitting the "Windows" key and typing to find tools/programs is already something I was familiar with in Windows 7. As I'm trying to relearn things I keep looking for informational apps like the Control Panel in Windows.

Mainly, I want to know how to make sure that this shiny new box is being fully utilized by Ubuntu. How can I make sure it is using the HD4000 instead of some more generic driver? I've located a page at Intel's site that lists a whole lot of stuff about their Linux driver but I'm admittedly clueless on how to act on that information for Ubuntu or even if I need to. Does 12.04 come with support for the HD4000?

Which leads me to another question... how best to transition from a Windows world to that of Linux/Ubuntu. As a long-time Windows user and programmer, what would be a good book (or books) and other reference material to help get me up to speed on how to do things "the Linux way" as well as "the Ubuntu way", so to speak. I'm a quick learner, so it doesn't have to be a "for dummies" style of book, but something allows me to translate "I did it this way in Windows" to "I need to do it this way in Linux/Ubuntu". I hope that makes sense.

Thank you very much for any help you can offer.