Beginning with Ubuntu

[PriceChild]

Getting my usb adsl modem going... eciadsl worked my modem better than in windows though once I figured it out

[derekr44]

• Widescreen resolution
• nVidia binary drivers
• Folder/File permissions (chmod)
• Where are my Program Files???

[andrewPCT]

Can you say Broadcom Wireless cards? I overcame this problem by always keeping a CAT5e handy.

[slira]

What was the most challenging thing you experienced when you started using Ubuntu, and how did you overcome it?

most challenging thing:
put a agere 131x ethernet card working under ubuntu 6.06, in a LG laptop

how did you overcome it:
with lost of help from the forums (and other sites) and lots of patience
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...et+131x&page=3

[Nevon]

Setting up a development server with Apache, PHP, Mysql and Ruby on Rails running together. In the end I used my windows partition for web development using Instant Rails.

[PartisanEntity]

The most challenging thing for me was getting my wireless card to work and understanding what the commands meant that I was entering into the terminal.

The terminal itself did not scare me, all I had to do was copy and paste commands, but I simply did not know what they did or meant.

That was it really, everything else, from installation to usage was pretty straight forward really.

[Vandread]

Well as you guys can see Im new here, always used windows and consider myself an advanced user. I dont know what possesed me to install ubuntu 3 days ago but im glad I did. Of course I didnt know how to install anything but I looked at some tutorials and have compiz fusion, awn dock, amarok all configured within a matter of 3 days. The hardest thing for me was getting compiz fusion to work LOL. I had no title bars so I couldnt move windows around. That took me until about last night at 11pm. I absolutely love ubuntu and its now on my laptop, windows vista/xp on my desktop. Havent touched my desktop in days.

Even though this might not be the thread for this but I just want to say thank you to all the help ive found on this forum even though I was lurking. I hate asking for help but I might be asking for some in the near future so I decided to make an account.

[Am3ndment]

Mine was (read: is) connecting to secured wireless network. (But i will beat my broadcom one day )

Haven't really got other problems. Thanks to good guides. (Even tho, i still dont know what most of those commands does )

[Henry Rayker]

Wireless...hands down. My first experiences with Ubuntu were incredibly sour due to the fact that, try as I might, I could not get wireless working. Not only that, but when I DID finally get it working, moving from release to release would severely break it again...

When I first installed Ubuntu, I had a PCMCIA card based on the rt61 chipset. No matter what I did, Ubuntu just would NOT see my card...so I gave up, went out and bought a D-Link DWL-122G using the rt2500usb chipset. I bought this because it worked "out of the box" in Breezy...when I upgraded to Dapper, it broke...my rt61 card would lock the machine and my rt2500 usb adapter would either not see any APs or would just hard lock the machine. I was pissed. I wound up learning more and installing the proper drivers and all...but the fact that a device that worked perfectly in Breeze was 100% busted in Dapper was a little bit...ridiculous to me. I waited for Edgy and, again, none of my cards worked. I wound up also getting a minipci card (ipw2200) which also required setup...

Considering that when I began using Ubuntu, everyone was clamoring about "better laptop support" and "better wireless support" I felt a little stilted. Especially because those phrases weren't even brought up anymore...everything was Beryl this and Compiz that and I just couldn't take it. I left and went to Fedora and was much happier. My system ran much slicker, my wireless worked fine out of the box (all 3 modules. The only thing I had to do was "yum install <firmware-package>")

Another MAJOR annoyance was the fact that Ubuntu couldn't auto-detect the fact that my laptop uses a widescreen. EVERY X update would hose my settings and I'd have to dpkg-reconfigure xorg-xserver just to get reasonable resolutions...Ubuntu is the ONLY distro I have tried that is so inept.

EDIT:
Did I overcome the problems? Yes. I actually was able to, for the most part, fix everything I had an issue with...however, fixing and re-fixing the same small issues every time I run an update isn't exactly my definition of fun, so I just couldn't do the Ubuntu thing anymore. Fedora handled those small issues much better; not only that, but things like NetworkManager (which I was told didn't work with Ralink cards here on the Ubuntu Forums) just worked fine. Also, the system was just faster. Now I am working on installing Gentoo (it takes so long to get everything up and running, but it's even faster than Fedora, so it's worth it). While there are loads of little configuration oddities, everything is just a lot more open and simple to deal with, in my opinion.

[FuturePilot]

Getting mp3 playback. Hey, I was a beginner, I hadn't the slightest clue

Getting the Nvidia driver installed. I didn't know it was in the repos. This was back when the restricted repos weren't enabled by default.

Getting Java installed. Didn't know that was in the repos either. Man, disabling the restricted repos really messed me up