Okay, another days worth of fiddling.
Some stuff seems to be done differently than windows just for the sake of being different. Thats not a plus to me. Putting stuff like the clock and the gnome equivalent of the 'start' button up top instead of on the bottom...<shift><control><V> to paste instead of <control><V>. That sort of thing. The "backspace" key doesnt do a 'back up one page' in firefox for linux.
There is an "overly polite" bend to everything and not necessarily in a good way for the average joe user. Some examples are that anything not open source is excluded or must be put in manually, a lot of stuff that most people would like arent put in automatically because (I guess) some people dont want it, so its more acceptable to make you opt in to wanting it than put it there and make people opt out.
I found a cool app called Automatix that automates the install of a whole bunch of applications like google earth, picasa, skype, etc. Smoothed out a bunch of that and made it a one step process. Nice.
I had one...aggravating...pain in the butt...annoying situation around the Flash player. Gabe has figured out that he can name anything and I can produce a video of it on the computer. Fire trucks are a common request. Unfortunately, ubuntu comes preconfigured with an open source flash product called Gnash, which unabashedly notes its ineffectiveness in working properly with a lot of flash content, yet because its open source, its in there and the real adobe flash player for linux is not. Getting rid of gnash and getting the flash player installed was a horror show. I spent 3 hours uninstalling, rebooting, restarting, and all sorts of command line kludges with no luck. Then I noticed that the old fasioned tar installer on the flash web site had a different version number than the synaptic package installer in ubuntu has... a .115 version instead of .48. When I pulled up the terminal window during the synaptic package install, I could see that it was failing with an md5 checksum error near the end. Oddly, firefox believed it had the flash plugin installed, but any web site with flash content would report that flash wasnt installed or wasnt the correct version.
Once I manually removed all the vestiges of the 'bad' flash install and manually untarred and installed the .115 version by hand, all was well.
Some other stuff sort of requires that you know what you want or want to do and presuming something is the way it oughta be for most people is a bad idea. There is no firewall installed by default. Telnet is wide open. The system is configured by default to glom onto any open wireless network in preference to the key secured router you have in your house. That sort of thing.
Throughout all of this s/w installation, glitches and other funny business, there are also frequent documentation flaws and presumptions. In a number of cases I was directed to click 'xyz/abc/123/' only to find that there was no 'abc' option or that it was called something else. In many cases, a help or installation file said 'you must do this following command with xyz' or 'special privileges are required for the following' without saying what they were or how one would go about successfully completing the step, unless they already knew.
So I'm going to retract a little bit of my above endorsement. While its very easy to set up a basic working system from the standard ubuntu distribution disk, and that system will have a lot of features and capabilities...you still really have to have some technical understanding of unix and its oddities to put together a fully functioning, secure, safe environment that is doing what most people really want it to do. And a lot of stuff requires some manual intervention and presumption on behalf of the software providers that the user has some understanding and knowledge of the technical aspects of the system.
