It's the summer and I'm bored. I installed Ubuntu and I'm interested in learning how to do menial tasks. What kind of things can I do with Linux?

What sort of tasks are you wanting to do?

Honestly, other than gaming (and even then, most games will run), you can do anything in Linux you can do in Windows.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

I don't know. People tell me that I shit on Linux too much. I figured to go ahead and install it to reinforce my hatred of Linux or become a Linux fan. Either way is fine with me.

The major problem I have with Linux is that I can't play WoW on it, out of the box. Is there some program like Wine that I can try to install and configure? Is it easy to install Video Drivers? I have nvidia cards.

What about setting up MP3 audio? Can I access my other drives out of the box to play my library across different hard drives?

Are there any neat tips or tricks on getting used to the file system, drive structure, or any cool tutorials? I dunno. I just want to learn the neat things Ubuntu can do.

If you have an nVidia card, you should have a little PCI/AGP card looking thing in your notification area, if not, go to "System -> Administration -> Driver Manager" Double clicking that will bring you into the restricted drivers manager, basically telling you "you can use a close source driver for more speed", just say yes, type in your password, and reboot. After that, hit alt-f2 to bring up the "run" box, type in "nvidia-settings-manager" (it will probably autocomplete for you) to tune your gamma/color/3d preferences, and make sure to apply it all. This will give you 3d accelerated drivers. The standard drivers give you 2d and some measure of 3d acceleration, but not much, since they're reverse engineered.
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To install WINE, click on "Applications -> Add/Remove", select "All available software" from the dropdown, search for "wine", check the box next to "wine windows emulator", and click "apply changes". Now that it's installed, you'll need to configure it. Hit alt-f2, type in "winecfg" and click ok, click on the audio tab, make sure the "OSS Driver" box is checked, and hit "ok"
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Now, you should have icons on your desktop already for your other drive partitions (if you installed it on the same system that you have Windows on). They'll correspond to the labels they have in My Computer on Windows.
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You can either copy your WoW install over from your Windows install, Install WoW from scratch on your linux partition (recommended), or (if you're brave) just run WoW from your current install on your Windows drive.

To install it from scratch, make a folder on your Desktop named "WoW", and copy the "Installer.exe" and the "Installer Tome X.mpq" files from all of the cd's there. If you right click the exe, there should be a "Run with WINE" option, if not, you can open a terminal from the "Application -> System Tools" menu, and type "wine Desktop/WoW/Installer.exe" (note that Linux is, as all good operating systems should be, case sensitive, so type the folder name exactly...make sure to avoid spaces in folder names unless really necessary imo) -- run through the installer as normal, do the same thing for TBC, then patch)

Once it's installed and patched, click on "Applications -> Wine -> Browse c: drive", navigate to your WoW directory, and double click your "config.wtf" file. Add these lines :

SET SoundOutputSystem “1″
SET SoundBufferSize “100″
SET gxApi “OpenGL”

Save and close, and then you can go to "Applications -> Wine -> Programs -> World of Warcraft" and launch the game from there. I've found that it runs better in linux than windows, personally
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As previously stated, you should already have icons on your desktop for your other drives, if it's the same system. You should have full read/write access to any data on these drives, from music to movies (VLC is available in Linux, and is what I personally recommend. Other media players will complain about non-free codecs (xvid/divx and WM formats are included in this), but they will install regardless. For MP3, I suggest Amarok, available in the "Add/Remove" option.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Not quite, superguy. WINE is fucking annoying, even with WINE Doors and compatibility isn't up to snuff. Don't get me wrong, I love have an emulated terminal box running, but as a primary OS? It's still got a looooong way to go. That said, FreeBSD or Slackware ftw!

For learning Linux, give justlinux.com (formerly linuxnewbie.org) a try. It's a great resource. Ubuntu is another great place to start, but keep in mind that's Debian, and while similar, doesn't necessarily give you the core "Red Hat" experience most people are looking for in the long run. Once you graduate from there, move on to Slack and then Lunar (northbridge compiling for great victory!) with XFCE.

Wasn't Debian or whatever in the hell it is, recently found to have a massive security breach in it making Linux OS's horribly vulnerable on the web? Like worse than Windows?

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"People sometimes say that ideas cannot be stamped out by force. The Albigensian Crusade proves them wrong. Ideas can be stamped out by the elimination of everyone who holds the ideas." - Quote :"Middle Ages" by Morris Bishop.

That was a bug that was quickly squashed once discovered.

And it was a problem in the upstream code of SSH, not anything Debian could do (other than not be like Nazi's in their package updates)

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Now, if I install Ubuntu on a new partition (made just a 10 gig one to fuck around with on my media drive) and install the boot loader, will I be able to revert to Windows Vista w/ ease? How simple is it to manage boot loaders? Is there an ideal way to dual boot Ubuntu w/ Vista?

Ubuntu should have installed GRUB, which will list Vista as an option when you first boot. If/when you decide you don't like Linux, you can boot to a recovery console and run "fixboot" and "fixmbr" and it will erase the bootloader.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

All that to play WoW on Linux? You guys haven't been kidding around; that is MUCH easier than in Windows when I put my CD-ROM into the drive and click on "install."

:p

I never said it was easy.

You're doing something Linux "isn't supposed to do", and doing anything your OS of choice isn't supposed to do is a bit time consuming.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

I'm just going to try using Linux for a while to see if it's a pain in the ass and deserve all the shit I give it. To me, I've always said it's not ready for the modern computer user and it's not as user-friendly as Windows.

Its not that its not ready.
It is ready.
The game devs and ISVs are not :\
And unfortunately that isn't going to change as long as DirectX exists and continues to be the primary choice for designers.
Which Microsoft did for that exact reason - a means to lock-in developers to the Windows platform.

It's not ready. There's little to no accountability for software updates for MANY applications. There's established support routes with SLA requirements. Driver support is also not up to par (not the fault of Linux, but lack of OSS support). The other area they're killing themselves is the geek UI minimalist approach. If you want XFCE? Fine. But you're going to need at the option of bells and whistles to appeal to the average schmuck. Is it a waste of resources? Possibily, just so long as it isn't bloat, the end-user won't mind in the least.

I wish Linux were ready for primetime, but it likely never will be, just due to the nature of OSS support framework. OpenOffice and Firefox are two of the best funded OSS apps out there, and they're both some of the major security/bug offenders. Say what you will about Microsoft, but ubiquity inspires support, and it's something they do well (for the vast majority at least). Linux needs to improve their support model across the board and maybe then they'll see customers who are then confident to adopt.

PS - They also need an alternative to MS Office and Sharepoint already! Mail with similar specs as Exchange would be nice as well.

So I have 4 hard drives in my computer.

C: IDE 74gig raptor
D: IDE 250 gig
E: SATA 300 Gig
F: SATA 500 gig

Now D only has about 35 gig free and F has about 130 gig free. I tried using Vista's "shrink" tool but on F it only allowed me like 9900mb shrink and on D it was only like 790 megs...

Whats up with that?

Then I tried to use Acronis Disk w/e, and I tried to shrink the partition to make room for a new one and when it tried to reboot it said the account I was on had no privileges to reboot the computer...

PM8 doesn't work with Vista.

What should I do? I can't wipe an entire drive because they're all media. Mp3s, videos, and documents for school.

What is the Ubuntu's option for "Install within windows" ? does that mean it makes a folder like C:\Linux and installs to there?? I'd prefer to have it on it's own 10 or 15 gig partition...

Sky, do a search for "Hiren's BootCD". That will give you all the tools you need to resize. As for installing from within Windows, don't bother. Once you create the space, Ubuntu will do the rest at boot with the size you've allocated. It will also add Windows automatically to the boot loader if it sees it listed within the MBR (which it will). Once the boot loader starts, you can change boot priority, etc.

If you choose to remove it at a later date, just do the following:

1. Boot to DOS (Hiren's BootCD can do that too) and type fdisk /mbr.
1a. Alternatively, you can load your Vista CD and run the boot repair option, which effectively does the same thing.

2. Once in booted into Vista, the go into Computer Management and then Disk Management. Vista includes the ability to merge the partition with empty space on the fly. That will allow you to reclaim your space.

Related question: Does Vista enable partition management? Slicing an existing partition? I'm an XP holdout.

Kind of... you can resize a partition via "shrink" but it doesn't work too well... for me at least. I assume after a successful shrink that you can create a new partition but I have not yet gotten that far... I keep getting "Access is denied." for some reason.

I didn't have any issues with that Syuni.