After talking with one of my colleagues did a bit more reading and installed GNOME in parallel with KDE. Man I love GNOME! So much more intuitive to me. OK taskbar's on top but it dosen't affect me too much ;) I think I'll still use Amarok and Kontact but GNOME's a keeper!
Here are the commands I used:
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install ubuntu-desktop
I know I would encounter some challenges. But now I see that what is a question of seconds to do inside windows took me two hours to understand and do under Linux. All my music os on a NAS drive. Even if I was able to use Dolphin and browse the NAS; I had to install the samba protocol (or helper program not sure of the right wording here) and mount it under my home. That's the article I based myself on to learn how to do it.
To install samba:
sudo apt-get install smbfs smbclient
To mount the NAS:
cd /home/username
mkdir Volume_1
sudo mount -t smbfs //192.168.x.x/Volume_1 /home/username/Volume_1
Line to add to the /etc/fstab file:
//192.168.x.x/Volume_1 /home/username/Volume_1 smbfs auto 0 0
To install winbind (allowing to use computernames instead of IP adresses:
sudo apt-get install winbind
To activate winbind edit the /etc/nsswitch.conf file so it looks something like that:
hosts: files dns mdns wins
My first deception was to think dual monitors would work right out of the box... No way! Well I can do it using NVidia's Video driver but, I have to set Twinview every single time I log in. Oh and editing the xorg.conf file failed miserably.
Man I hate VI.... Good thing I had a concept of the root user and vi to make changes to automatically mount my NAS at boot time. Man Linux world just loves typing too much!
So i've finally decided myself to give a real try with Linux. I chose Kubuntu because it was recommended to me about a year ago to ease my transition from the windows environment.
My chalenge is to work ony in a Linux environment for at least a whole week. If I need something to do something and I dont know how; I'll have to find out. No switching at all to windows...
Downloading and installing Kubuntu was quite easy. It did not work in a virtual machine as I first tried but I just resized my XP partition and installed on the unformatted chunk.
