[Nottingham] Ubuntu fully installed

[Robert Postill]

On Sat, 2005-02-19 at 12:17, Ron Wilton wrote:
>  
> Thanks for the warm welcome on Wednesday evening.
Thanks for coming down and swelling our number :)
>  
> I am disappointed a little with the slowness of GNOME - especially
> with OpenOffice, though perhaps I shouldn't really be too surprised as
> my system only has 62MB RAM available (2MB has been taken up for the
> onboard graphics). 
The bad news is that GNOME and OpenOffice do chew through memory at an
incredible rate.  So long term it will be a RAM upgrade.  You might get
some short-term results by using less heavyweight alternatives like
Blackbox/Fluxbox or IceWM and Abiword (at least for word processing).
> Are there any ways of how I might speed up the system (eg are there 
> some programmes running in the background that might be taking up RAM
> that I might not need), before I go and buy some more memory.
Speeding a linux system can be achieved in numerous ways, but most
likely you'll not find a lot of things to trim.  The reason being that
all modern Linux distros ship with the maximum number of options turned
off.  It means the bad guys have less opportunity to subvert your
system.  So rarely will there be a bunch of useless programmes (also
called daemons) running in the background.
 
> I'm also having problems with the CD player as it sometimes freezes
> the system when I try to read from it.
One thought, if it's an old CD drive that connects via a sound card it
*might* be an IRQ conflict.  They're a real pain to sort out but have a
look in your BIOS and see if you can spot devices with the same IRQ.  If
it's a new PC (i.e. it uses PCI) that advice won't really apply. 
> I'm finding it difficult getting my head around the linux file
> management system - I think this is due to my thinking 'Windows'. Do
> you have any suggestions that might help me change my thinking.
>  
I'd have a couple of suggestions:
* Try and think of the UNIX filesystem as one big C: drive. / is then
just C:\.  And just like C:\ its bad form to put things there.
* /etc is like the registry, here is where most of your config lives.
* /usr is like c:\Program Files.  Most of the programs you install end
up somewhere inside /usr.  /bin and /sbin are normally shortcuts
(symlinks) to /usr.
* /home is more My Documents, but with better security.
* /var is like the system event log, expect things the system wants to
record or store before presenting to you (like e-mails) to end up there.
* /dev and /proc are like the device manager, have a poke around by all
means, but don't change anything unless you're sure you mean it.
* /tmp is like the c:\temp directory, don't put anything in you want to
keep.

Hope that helps.
Robert.
-- 
Robert Postill
robert at grinning-cat.com
Tel:07968 801326
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