Ubuntu Adventure

I am finally facing the demise of XP on my old home computer.  My faithful Dell XPS 400 has been limping along for months on XP, which has been in a state where I can't even shut it down.  Updates no longer take and even cause it to fail.  I've tried a reinstall, but even that has had little long-term effect.

So I went out the other night and purchased a 1TB drive at OfficeDepot, anticipating that I would have some time over Thanksgiving to work on it.   I had already downloaded Edubuntu (just Ebuntu with some extra software wrapped in with the distro) and was able to successfully install it.

So far, I've been able to get it running and have spent hours looking through all the preinstalled software.  Additionally, I installed MonoDevelop and played around with making an application in C#.

A few notes on some things that I ran into:

• Had some problems getting the Flash player to work with Firefox, so tried Chromium and that seemed to behave when I was trying to watch YouTube.
• The latest MonoDevelop (4.x) is not available on Ubuntu, so 3.x will have to do.  Debian does have an inferior version of 4.x but 4.2.1 seems to be only on Windows as of this writing.
• When I tried to run RhythmBox, it complained about not having the right plugins.  Found the following post useful:
• http://askubuntu.com/questions/133174/how-to-play-mp3-files-using-rhythmbox
• Once I ran "sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras", everything worked fine.

 Hopefully, this will be useful to someone (perhaps myself if I have to reinstall).