there we go, got all the updates and such to go at a decent rate, it automatically added more sources now, I'm just wondering why exactly Linux doesn't use .exe at all?

It does, they're just marked as Binary files. Only Windoze is STILL wholly reliant on file extensions to tell the OS what type of file it is.

^ it's handy when you want to trick windows haha. but when I went to d/l Flashplayer directly, there were 4 different ways to download it, from what I gathered they were mostly just different compression formats, but when I decompressed them and tried to run the file inside, nothing happened.

so Gnome died somehow, I reinstalled and it fixed it however now when I boot the default is different, and it has a bunch of extra options I don't want. I opened up disk/boot/grub/menu.lst and found this, I'm pretty sure I know what to move/delete to get it how I want but I'm unsure. Currently:

so since I don't want the "Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic" and instead want the -9 as default, along with -9 recovery mode, and Vista and nothing else, can I just delete the entries I don't want, or comment them out, and move the "Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-9-generic" and it's info to the default spot?

Now you're into territory I dare not venture into. :lol

pansy! :P

No, just lazy. :p

that works too haha, I'm starting to get lazy here and I'm thinking of going back to Vista, Ubuntu boots faster but once it's going it seems to run slower, albeit without as many jam ups. I'm too lazy to run Wine and I'm too lazy to figure some of this shit out, I've tried 5 different archivers that claim to unpack .rar's but they don't. oddly it won't let me d/l winrar. stupid thing.

You need to get unrar and rar in Synaptic.

If you are just getting into it, the best way to do it IMO instead of dual booting is to use VMWare. You can just switch back and forth between Windows and your Linux distro if you need to do anything.

As far as distros go, Ubuntu seems to be one of the most popular. I've got it installed on a VM here on my laptop, and most of the Windows admins that I know who tinker with Linux use Ubuntu as well.

I've tried, it won't let me select it for download. wierd thing. eventually I just gave up, copied it to the Vista part. flipped to Vista, unpacked it, and flipped back.

haha too late, I considered a VM but then I figured by the time I get everything all nice and setup and want to put it on my computer, I'll have to start over again, plus I wouldn't be able to see if there's any performance benefits over Windows. I know I'll always need Windows in some form or another so I'm sticking to the partitions. Ubuntu happened to have all the drivers I needed so I went with it, I think it was Mandriva that wouldn't even boot from the Live CD and Fedora looked exactly like Ubuntu except blue not orange, and without all my drivers.

latest issue: mounting flash drive and my USB HDD to my g/f's laptop, it says we don't have the permissions to mount the drive. I can go into terminal, sudo su myself and enter the password, then force the drives to mount, but that's a bit of a pain when you're connecting/disconnecting daily. She's on Suse and I'm on Ubuntu, how do I change the priviledges on the user accounts to permanent sudo status?