Windows XP to Ubuntu

[janhoedt]

Hi,

I switched over my second home pc to Ubuntu. This in order to play around with it + install VMWare/VirtualBox. Goal: switching over both Windows machines to Ubuntu with an option to use Windows if I really needed.
This config I could setup for friends in order to convince them to switch over to Ubuntu.

Hardware: HP 8530p laptop. Love the sofware center, look forward to find the Linux alternatives but some points are blocking me.

Some basic questions:

-installation went fine but memory consumation worries me: as much as my Windows XP (900 MB of 2 GB): I thought I would have much more ram available to run virtual machines
=> I know there 's a XUbuntu but this version doesn't complete commandline commands when pressing tab

-constantly I get the message that I'm not allowed to (GUI), I probably have to sudo (can do this on command line, but don't know how to do this in a GUI)
can't sudo on commandline, as soon as I type d, it disconnects
=> is there a basic video or short manual to get me on track?

-found out how to setup a RDP-server so I can remote connect to RDP, but my keyboard is in qwerty if I connect (should be belgian), can be in some configuration file, but I hoped to have a OS as friendly as Windows XP, I'll dig in deeper the OS as soon as I'm convinced I'll find everything I need as in Windows
note: console sessions is REALLY slow/not workable

! I connected my laptop to my flatscreen, it shows "video not supported" in whatever resolution I set my external screen (it recognizes a Philips (max resolution 1366 x 768p), I would have loved to play my movies with XBMC but when my screen isn't supported (it was supported in XP, resolution 720 ...) ....
How could I download/install drivers for the video-card?

Thanks for your help.

J.

[nujinini]

Hi and welcome!

Lets see if we can spot something that can help us here.

I switched over my second home pc to Ubuntu. This in order to play around with it + install VMWare/VirtualBox. Goal: switching over both Windows machines to Ubuntu with an option to use Windows if I really needed.
This config I could setup for friends in order to convince them to switch over to Ubuntu.

So your saying so where able to set-up your system to double boot or did you install ubuntu inside windows via virtualbox?

Can you please post the output of

$ sudo fdisk -l

-l is a small L

Hardware: HP 8530p laptop. Love the sofware center, look forward to find the Linux alternatives but some points are blocking me.

Can you post

$ lspci -v

-installation went fine but memory consumation worries me

Post

$ free

=> I know there 's a XUbuntu...

Post

$uname -a

[reed9]

-installation went fine but memory consumation worries me: as much as my Windows XP (900 MB of 2 GB): I thought I would have much more ram available to run virtual machines
=> I know there 's a XUbuntu but this version doesn't complete commandline commands when pressing tab

Tab completion is not dependent on the desktop environment. It ought to work in any distro or variation. Make sure you have the package bash-completion installed.

Any distro running GNOME or KDE will use a fair amount of memory. It's the curse of the modern operating system. Even XFCE in Ubuntu is pretty heavy, since a lot of memory use depends on the background services running and which apps are installed. The lightest desktop environment in the world running Firefox with multiple tabs is going to eat up memory. If you're careful and select only lightweight apps and a lightweight window manager, you can significantly reduce the base memory usage. I've got my netbook running compiz as a standalone window manager and the baseline memory usage is generally around 100-200MB. But it takes some effort and lightweight apps generally are not as "user friendly" to folks new to the linux world.

-constantly I get the message that I'm not allowed to (GUI), I probably have to sudo (can do this on command line, but don't know how to do this in a GUI)
can't sudo on commandline, as soon as I type d, it disconnects
=> is there a basic video or short manual to get me on track?

I'm really not clear what you're describing. If what you're asking is how to launch something as root in the GUI, use gksudo instead of sudo. Otherwise, if you can post specific error messages and describe more what you're doing, that would help.

I don't use RDP and I've never tried to use a television so I can't help much there.

I know the command line rdesktop client for RDP has an option to set the keyboard map.

For the TV, if you can the lspci output that nujinini mentioned above, we can see what your graphics card is.

[elija]

Unlike Windows XP, Linux will assign unused memory to buffers and cache. To see this in operation simply start your word processor, close it and restart it. See how much faster it was the second time? The memory used for this will be freed as it's needed. The free command will show how much is buffers / cache.

Xubuntu should handle tab completion as it is a function of the terminal. I haven't used it for a while but I seem to remember it just working like that. As a side note, in LMDE (XFCE), tab completion works.

I can't comment on RDP as I have never used it; I am however using using two HD monitors / TVs at 1920 * 1080. I have an NVidia card with the nvidia drivers but Nouveau worked as well.

To see if you need to install any proprietary drivers, go to System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers