i only installed ubuntu as an act of boredom. now i'm completely hooked, as it's solved all of my previous gripes about linux (i'd previously only tried rpm-based distros and installing anything wound up a tangled mess of unmet dependencies). i've actually completely switched from xp except for my audio work, which can't be done on linux, and for watching dvds because i haven't gotten my ati's s-video out to work yet (haven't tried).
thing is, i'm an xp power user. if i need it done in xp, it gets done. i know where everything is and what to change and blah blah. i'm totally that guy people call when something breaks. i am the spyware cleaner. i am the trojan remover. i am the 'please please please stop opening IE' guy.
and i've done pretty well with ubuntu so far, i think, much thanks to the existance of this forum and ubuntuguide.org, but there are some things i just don't know where the windows equivalents of are, or locations of files and installed programs. some very basic things (like what exactly a lib* package is for - i assume it's the linux equivalent of a .dll but i don't honestly know for sure) are still very foggy concepts to me.
and it's a little frustrating.
so i was wondering if there was an article or something somewhere that shows where linux equivalents of things are. mostly i just mean in the filesystem. in windows, everything is pretty much in the registry or /system32 somewhere, /program files if it's a speciffic app i'm trying to mess with, but in linux, i have no clue.
also some info about _why_ some things are the way they are. why is there no linux equivalent to .exe? why can't apps just have installers? why do i have to compile things? why would i want to compile my own kernel? why can't i write to my ntfs partition (problematic because in xp i can't even see my linux one)?
so many questions. how important is a swap partition? is this identical to pagefile.sys? where can i get more fonts? why do so many fonts look exactly the same?
it goes on and on. i feel pretty lost sometimes. i basically just don't quite get the architechure of it all. i don't know where things are coming from. but overall it's a breath of fresh air and a very welcomed set of challenges. it's a lot of information to suddenly not have anymore though, you know?
i really love this distro. i've dual booted a fair amount since i got my first distro (red hat, late 90s) but i never thought i'd make a full-on switch - it'd been years since i even thought about installing linux when i did it this time - i tried a long list before i got to ubuntu and once it booted i just quit looking instantly (synaptic totally owns me). if it weren't for my being a musician and needing Max/MSP and Reason as well as not being able to get my wifi to work under ubuntu, xp would be history.
anyway, any help would be much appreciated. thanks in advance. just to clarify, i'm not asking these questions, just where to find out the answers to them. i figured some of you probably have some good resources.
Bookmarks