Ubuntu How To Roundup

I recently set up a dual boot system on my Gateway laptop, with Windows XP and Ubuntu (edgy). After working my way through some issues mounting my NTFS drive, which I was able to do with this ntfs 3g walkthrough, and forcing a checkdisk in windows by opening the run from start and typing ‘chkdsk /f’, without quotes.

The next obstacle I had to overcome was having root privileges when installing a few of Lifehacker’s top 10 apps. After a bit of googling I found out that simply adding sudo, to the beginning of a command will allow the install to proceed. For example, “sudo apt-get install checkgmail".

Finally I had to get sound working on my gateway 4525GZ laptop. This proved to me that most fixes in Linux are easy as soon as you know what to do. In order to enable sound I had to mute the external amplifier. Again after some research it turns out this is an easy thing to do. Mute your external amplifier to fix no sound in Ubuntu.

Another useful app is brightside which allows you to switch between workspaces by moving your mouse off the side of the screen.  You can get brightside by simply opening your terminal and typing

sudo apt-get install brightside

then to run it

brightside

and to set it up

brightside-properties

If you want to make brightside or any other program start when you boot Ubuntu go to System->Preferences->Sessions choose the Startup Programs Tab, click add and put the name of the program you want to start in.  For this example brightside.  For another handy program, I simply put in checkgmail.

I hope these help someone else out, and I know I will find them useful next time I do a Ubuntu install.