How to Make the Switch From Windows to Linux

If you don’t want to upgrade from Windows 7 or are sick of Windows 10, here’s how to finally make the switch to Linux and install apps.

Microsoft is finally ending support for Windows 7 in January, meaning you won’t get bug fixes or security updates anymore. If you’re one of the final Windows 7 holdouts and don’t want to get stuck with an unsafe system, you have a choice to make: upgrade to Windows 10 or switch to something else entirely.

If you don’t like the direction Microsoft has taken with Windows 10, we understand. It’s gotten better (and you can make it feel more like Windows 7 with a few tweaks), but its new approach to Windows as a Service means there will always be more of a focus on embedded advertisements, constant updates, and data collection. If you’ve been thinking about making the jump to Linux, now is the time.

Choose Your Distribution

Unlike Windows and macOS, there isn’t just one version of Linux. Instead, Linux is packaged into many different distributions, or «distros,» each with their own interface and set of features. One may use a Mac-like interface with a dock and an «app store,» while others may use a more minimalist interface and require installing apps from the command line.

Exploring the bevy of Linux distributions out there is a fun part of the hobby, but for your first installation, you will likely want something popular and beginner-friendly, so it’s easy to get help when you need it. That’s why I recommend starting with Linux Mint.

There are a lot of distributions that aim to mimic Windows in layout and functionality, like Zorin OS, but they’re on the smaller side, and you won’t have as big a community to tap as you learn your way around. Ubuntu, on the other hand, is arguably the most popular distro on desktop PCs, but it isn’t very Windows-like at all these days.

Linux Mint is a perfect in-between option: it’s designed for beginners, offers a familiar desktop environment, and it’s based on Ubuntu, so you can make use of the enormous Ubuntu/Mint community when you need help.

You’re free to check out other distros instead, but I’ll be using Mint for the purposes of this guide, and I recommend you do too. It’s not my personal distro of choice, but it’s great for new Windows migrants, and it’s easier to explore other distros once you’ve nailed down the basics on a beginner-friendly system.

Create Your Installation Drive

Head to Mint’s download page and choose the 64-bit «Cinnamon» version. Cinnamon is the desktop environment I recommend for former Windows users, though MATE is also pretty Windows-like, even though it’s a bit less modern. XFCE is ideal for old or low-powered PCs, thanks to its light resource usage.

Mint’s download page provides a number of links depending on where you live. If you use BitTorrent, I recommend grabbing the torrent file, which will download much faster.

The installer will come as an ISO, or disc image file. To install it on your system, you’ll need to burn it to a DVD (by right-clicking it and choosing Burn Disc Image in Windows 7) or USB flash drive. We’re going to do the latter using a tool called Rufus. Install Rufus, open it up, and insert a flash drive that’s 2GB or larger. (If you have a fast USB 3.0 drive, all the better.) You should see it appear in the Device drop-down at the top of Rufus’ main window.

Next, click the Select button next to Disk or ISO image, and choose the Linux Mint ISO you just downloaded. Press the Start button, and if prompted to download new versions of Syslinux, click Yes. Note that this will erase your flash drive, so make sure there isn’t anything important on there before continuing.

When it’s finished, you’ll see a success message and your flash drive will be named LINUX MINT. Back up your data, reboot your computer, and buckle your seat belts: it’s time to install Linux.

Install Linux on Your PC

As your computer reboots, you should see a message telling you to press a certain key to access the Boot Menu (usually something like F12). If not, you’ll see a key to enter Setup (often Delete). Press one of those keys, and look for the option to boot from the inserted USB drive. (If you enter the full setup menu, it’ll be in a Boot settings menu somewhere, and you’ll have to exit the menu to reboot again when you’re done.)

You will then be greeted by GRUB, Linux Mint’s boot menu, where you can choose to boot into Linux Mint. If you run into any errors, you may need to Google around for a fix. I had to enable the nomodeset option for my graphics card, for example. Others may have to tweak or disable Secure Boot in the BIOS.

This installer is what we call a Live CD, where you can actually poke around and use the Linux Mint desktop before installing it. This will give you a chance to see if this particular distro appeals to you without it actually touching your system drive.

Once you’re satisfied, double-click the Install Linux Mint icon and go through the wizard. Be sure to check the box next to Install third-party software, since it contains useful drivers and codecs you almost certainly want.

From here, you have a few options. You can wipe your hard drive entirely, erasing all traces of Windows and using Linux as your only operating system. (Make double sure you’ve backed up your data before doing this.) Alternatively, you can divide your drive up into two partitions and dual boot Linux alongside Windows.

This will allow you to reboot into one or the other whenever you want. Keep in mind that Windows 7 will be left insecure, so you don’t want to spend too much time there. If nothing else, it’s comforting to know you have that safety net during the transition before you remove Windows entirely.

Choose the relevant option from the Installation Type menu, and click Install Now. The process may take a little while, but when it’s done, you’ll get a success message. Click the Restart Now button to boot into Linux Mint and start getting acquainted with your new OS.

Get Acquainted With Linux and Install Some Apps

When you reboot, you’ll be dropped into the Linux Mint desktop once again—only this time, it’s installed on your PC. The basics are pretty familiar: click the button in the lower-left corner to see applications, manage windows from the bottom taskbar, and so on. There are, however, a few things in Linux that work differently than in Windows, with apps being the biggest.

In Linux, it’s less common to download apps from the web. Instead, each distro has its own repository—kind of like a free app store, with a directory of popular apps. You can install an app from the repositories in one of two ways: from a graphical software manager (again, which looks like an app store) or from the command line.

To open Linux Mint’s Software Manager, click the menu button in the lower-left corner and head to Administration > Software Manager (or just start typing «software manager,» like you would in Windows). From here you can download plenty of free, open-source apps.

Some are Linux versions of their Windows counterparts, like Steam and Spotify, while others are open-source alternatives to common apps (Banshee is a music player similar to iTunes, Gimp is an image editor akin to Photoshop). You can browse here or search for apps using the bar at the top.

How to Install and Uninstall Apps

If you know what you’re looking for, it’s generally faster to install apps from the command line. And while it may seem intimidating at first, Linux still relies on the command line for various tasks, so it might behoove you to get comfortable with it. To install an app—let’s say the open-source media player VLC—open a Terminal window and run:

Sudo apt update

sudo apt install vlc

Let’s break that down: sudo tells the system to run the command as root (or, as it might be called in Windows, as an administrator), apt is the name of Linux Mint’s package manager, and update ensures the list of available apps is up to date.

The second command, which includes install vlc, is self-explanatory. You should run sudo apt update before installing any app, and you can replace vlc with the name of any app you want to install. If you aren’t sure what the repository calls it, you can run sudo apt cache search vlc to see what comes up.

To uninstall an app, just run:

sudo apt remove vlc

This will remove the app, but not your configuration files, so if you decide to reinstall it later, your settings will still be there.

If you want to remove configuration files too, you can instead run:

sudo apt purge vlc

How to Update Apps

You’ll also want to periodically update those apps, so you have the latest versions. You can do this, again, in two ways: from the graphical tool or from the command line. For the graphical tool, click the shield icon in the lower-right corner, which opens the Update Manager app. You can then click the Install Updates button to update all your software.

Alternatively, you can open a Terminal and run two commands:

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

Again, the update command checks for new versions of your software, and the upgrade command actually upgrades all your apps. You’ll want to run these two together, just like you do for installing new apps.

Those are the most crucial things to know right now, but take some time to browse around Mint’s interface and its settings to see what it has to offer. The Welcome window that appears at startup can be a big help—its First Steps area will show you how to choose different desktop layouts, install multimedia codecs you might want, and install necessary drivers for your hardware.

You’ll get the hang of the basics pretty quickly, but the Mint and Ubuntu forums are always there to help if you get stuck. Just be sure to search around, since there’s a good chance someone before you has had the same question.

How to move file from Windows local machine to Linux remote server [closed]

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it’s on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed 3 years ago .

I’m new to working with a remote server. I am trying to get a file to be copied from my local machine (Windows 10) to a Ubuntu server. I’m using ssh with PuTTY.

What I try to do is this:
scp D:\USER\Desktop\test.txt username@server:home

I get :

ssh: Could not resolve hostname d: Name or service not known

So I tried a couple of other things such as:

Which returns:

Desktop/test.txt: No such file or directory

Of course, there is an existing text file test.txt in my desktop.

I have the feeling I can’t work out how to format the Windows path.

1 Answer 1

Assuming D is the drive you installed windows on the syntax would be

scp D:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Desktop\test.txt USERNAME@remoteserver:

The backslash for your windows path is okay, use forward slashes for the ssh remote server path

If you have a private key with which you can connect to the remote server you can provide it with the -i flag

/.ssh/privatekey.pem D:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Desktop\test.txt USERNAME@remoteserver:

The standard port for an ssh server would be 22 if it is another port than provide that with the -p flag e.g. -p 2222

Double check if the remote host is reachable e.g. use nmap or zenmap and port is open. Good luck.

PS: There is also a Putty Secure Copy program available through the pscp utility. You can launch it separately from putty in the command prompt

From MozillaZine Knowledge Base

This article is written for users who are moving from Windows to Linux and want to continue to use Mozilla applications. It can be used with any Linux distribution or window manager, but is somewhat Ubuntu-centric due to that distribution’s popularity.

Most Linux distributions have a package manager that supports Thunderbird and Firefox. Many distributions also provide packages for other Mozilla projects (SeaMonkey, Sunbird, . ). If you’re using Ubuntu for example, you can use Synaptic to install it if it’s not already installed. There is no need to use Automatrix or apt-get. This is the easiest and safest way to install the application, and will meet most users needs.

The tradeoff is that many Linux distributions only release updates for security fixes, since many companies don’t want things to change. To help keep things stable, they will frequently disable Help -> Check for Updates, forcing you to wait for the next release of the Linux distribution for any new functionality.

How much of an impact this has depends upon the application. Mozilla strongly recommends you always update all of their applications (regardless of why a new version was released). However, most security updates for Thunderbird are for low priority issues that aren’t a problem if you use common sense, while Firefox tends to have more serious security issues. This seems to explain why Ubuntu frequently releases updates whenever a new version of Firefox is available, but doesn’t do so for Thunderbird.

Contents

Moving your profile data

• Install Firefox and Thunderbird in Linux.
• If you have any extension (add-on) installed that has platform-specific components in the profile, such as the Lightning calender for Thunderbird, you have to uninstall it first in your Windows profile. Once you have moved it to Linux, you can then reinstall the Linux version of that extension (in the case of Lightning, all your calendar data should be retained).
• Some extensions (such as IE Tab for Firefox) work only on Windows. It is recommended that you uninstall (or at least disable) any of them that is installed in your Windows profile before moving.
• Find your existing Firefox profile and Thunderbird profile.
• Copy the the contents of the Firefox profile over the profile in the «.mozilla/firefox» subdirectory in your home directory. Copy the contents of the Thunderbird profile over the profile in the «.thunderbird» subdirectory in your home directory. They are hidden subdirectories, you need to find an option in your file browser to display them. In both Gnome and KDE you can use «Show -> hidden files» to show directories that begin with a period. If you’re dual-booting, many distributions provide read-only access to your NTFS partition in the file manager, you don’t have to copy the profile to some type of removable media.
• Your package manager typically adds a menu command to run Firefox and Thunderbird when it installs them. For Ubuntu, it’s at Applications -> Internet.

If the application doesn’t start, type locate run-mozilla.sh in a terminal. It should return the directories that have that file, which also contain either the «firefox» or «thunderbird» shell scripts used to start the application. Type echo $PATH into a terminal and verify the directory is on the path.

If it starts but doesn’t work correctly, try running in safe mode to temporarily disable any added extensions. While they normally also work under Linux you occasionally run into Gnome or KDE integration problems, or it might not be using a relative pathname to store its data. Exiting the application and deleting the extensions.rdf file in the profile also solves many problems (it will be recreated when you run the application).

You could have also used one of the other methods described in moving your profile to tell Firefox and Thunderbird where to look for the profile. For example, you might want to create a «profiles» directory that contains both your Firefox and Thunderbird profiles.

Other considerations

The Help -> Check for Updates menu is enabled in the build on the Mozilla web site, but it’s frequently disabled (though you can still check for updates for add-ons) if you installed it using a package manager with a graphical front end such as Synaptic or Adept. Typically the package manager will check for updates once a day, and ask if you want to upgrade if it finds one.

Ubuntu installs an Alltray program to «dock any application with no native tray icon (like Evolution, Thunderbird, Terminals) into the system tray». If you don’t get a new mail icon in the system tray try either installing it or the Mozilla New Mail Icon (Biff) extension.

The menus are different under Linux. Tools -> Options and Tools -> Account Settings are replaced by Edit -> Preferences and Edit -> Account Settings. Additional command line arguments are supported under Linux.

Not all of the fonts that you’re used to are available. You may want to install the Microsoft TrueType Fonts. With Ubuntu (or any Debian based distribution) you can use either the package manager or Automatrix to install the msttcorefonts package . For other distributions (Fedora, openSUSE etc.) you could install the rpm’s from this web site if you can’t find a more convenient solution.

Using a package manager

Debian

Debian distributes rebranded versions of Firefox (Iceweasel) and Thunderbird (Icedove). Packages for testing/sarge and unstable/sid users are available in the standard Debian repository. You can fetch and install them using apt-get. You need root access to use it. Type

That will prompt you for the root password. Then update your apt repository.

and fetch/install the desired application.

Gentoo

Install it from a root prompt using Emerge.

will prompt you for the root password. Then fetch/install the desired application using:

You can use firefox-bin and thunderbird-bin instead to install the official binary build. If you run into problems you may need to resync using emerge —sync .

Mandriva

Configure urpmi on your system, using the instructions at easyurpmi. Then use System/Configuration/Packaging/Install Software in the Mandriva Control Center and search for firefox or thunderbird. You could also just type the following from the root in a console:

The applications should be listed in the menu.

openSUSE

The easiest way to install Mozilla applications is through YaST, the SUSE/openSUSE package manager (you have other options with the 10.2+ versions). Those RPM software packages are customized versions of the regular releases. You will have to decide which repository to use:

• The standard repositories provide you with the currently available RPMs that were QA-checked by SUSE and distributed through their online repositories and their media. Those have the advantage that they are automatically updated by openSUSE when using YOU (YaST Online Update) or Automated Updates. The disadvantage is that it may take a while until the RPMs and delta-RPMs are verified and uploaded. No additional steps are necessary to use those packages.

• The openSUSE Build Service provides full RPM’s in sync or shortly after each new release, with minor patching between releases. The advantage is the immediate availability, the disadvantage is that you have to install them manually. To make those packages available, you have to select «Installation Sources» in YaST and add the correct repository for your distribution as HTTP repository to your list.

To install or update Mozilla applications from those repositories:

1. Start YaST and go into «Software Management».
2. Enter the application name into the «Search» field.
3. If not yet checked, check those applications you want to install (note that some applications may have multiple packages, e.g., SeaMonkey’s mail/news and IRC are separate packages in addition to the base RPM).
4. Continue with the installation and let YaST resolve any dependencies to other packages and libraries

To update, run YaST Online Update for the regular repositories. For the openSUSE Build Service repository, repeat the sequence above and change the Lock symbol to the «Z»-like symbol for updating this package.

RHEL/Fedora

Firefox and Thunderbird are installed by default under both RHEL and Fedora. You can install an updated version from a root account in a terminal:

If you want to use packages from the Fedora Development repository (used to test new releases, so it could break other packages):

Ubuntu

Use either the Synaptic (Gnome) or Adept (KDE) package manager to install the application depending upon which type of Ubuntu you’re running.

For example, select Applications, System, Synaptic Package Manager and enter your password at the prompt. Press the Search button and enter firefox (or thunderbird). Scroll through the list and find the firefox package. Click on the box to the left of it, selecting «Mark for installation». Then press the Apply button. This will install the firefox package plus several other packages it requires.

This should add the application to the menu. You could also add it to the panel (the equivalent of a windows shortcut), or run it from the terminal.

If later on you ever get confused whether you’re running a Ubuntu or a Mozilla build run the following from a terminal:

Builds from Mozilla.org look in

/.thunderbird for the profile while builds from the Ubuntu repository (Synaptic, Adept, apt-get) look in

Using a build from the Mozilla web site

If you don’t want to use a build provided by the package manager you can download and install a release from the Mozilla web site. It has the latest release, and doesn’t disable automatically checking for updates. You also avoid the risk of a third party build adding code from the trunk (code that is not ready for use by everybody yet) without you knowing about it like Ubuntu sometimes does.

The following instructions are written for Firefox but also apply to Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Sunbird, etc.

• Download the latest release to your home directory with your browser. If it was Firefox version 2.0.0.6 the file would be firefox-2.0.0.6-tar.gz.
• Extract the contents with an archiving utility such as Ark or tar. If you’re using Ubuntu you can right clink on the file in the file browser, and select «Open with Archive Manager» instead.

or (for Firefox 3.0 and above, and mutatis mutandis for Thunderbird 3.x, SeaMonkey 2.x, Sunbird 1.x, . )

• You can use the files where they are, or move them to a publicly accessible location such as /usr/local or /opt. That is useful if you have multiple users. If you’re the only user or the distribution installed its own copy of Firefox its recommended you store it in the home partition to avoid potential problems.

• Instead of installing to the home directory then moving to a publicly accessible location, the root user can (with GNU tar) install directly to the final location, for instance:
  • the first time

• • updating to a new version

• Verify it works by using the cd command to change the directory to wherever you stored the application and then type:

If you get an error message similar to /firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory your release was built requiring libstdc++5 rather than libstdc++6. Install libstdc++5 using whatever package manager your distro supports. Don’t get rid of libstdc++6. If you still get error messages for missing libraries and you are running a 64-bit operating system, the respective 32-bit libraries may not be installed (the Mozilla builds are currently all 32-bit only); thus, make sure to install the 32-bit packages as well. Or else, make sure that you installed the 64-bit version and not the 32-bit version of Firefox / Thunderbird / SeaMonkey. 64-bit builds may be a little harder to find that the 32-bit ones but they exist.

• Create a link to launch Firefox. If you’re using Gnome, use System- > Preferences -> Main Menu -> New Item and then browse to the «firefox» shell script in the directory. Or right click on the panel (taskbar), select Add to Panel, Custom application launcher, and then browse to the «firefox» shell script.

Step by step example using Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 for Ubuntu

This example doesn’t use the default profile location in order to make it easier to troubleshoot. It uses the Mozilla build for Ubuntu, not the Ubuntu third party build.

• Download the latest release using your browser from http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/

• Open the file browser. Right click on thunderbird-2.0.0.22.tar.gz and extract it using the Archive Manager into your home directory. This will create a thunderbird subdirectory.

• Launch the Synaptic package manager and type libstdc++ in the Quick search window. If it doesn’t list libstdc++5 install it. Exit Synaptic. (Typically only libstdc++6 is installed by default in Ubuntu. Thunderbird won’t use the newer version.)

• Expand the thunderbird subdirectory, select thunderbird (its listed as a shell script in the Type column but it doesn’t have a. sh file extension), right click and select properties and then permissions. Verify «allow executing file as program» is checked.

• Open a terminal window in the thunderbird subdirectory. If you had installed nautilus-open-terminal you could right click on the thunderbird subdirectory in the file browser and select «Open in terminal». Otherwise you need to run the terminal application from Applications -> Accessories and navigate there.

• Type:

and verify Thunderbird runs. It should start the new account wizard. Abort and exit Thunderbird.

• Create a Profiles subdirectory in your home directory using File -> Create folder. You may want to create a Thunderbird and Firefox subdirectory in it.

• Check «view hidden files» in the View menu in the file browser and copy your profile to the Profiles subdirectory you just created. You should be able to double click your windows partition in the file browser and have it automatically mount the NTFS partition (your boot drive) for you if you’re using a recent version of Ubuntu. Otherwise burn the profile to a CD-R disk, copy it to a USB flash drive or copy it to a FAT32 partition under Windows beforehand.

  Don’t copy the windows directory named Profiles. The Thunderbird profile directory normally has a weird name like vyzo5c3k.default and is a subdirectory of Profiles. The subdirectory you want to copy has an abook.mab and a prefs.js file. It will also be pointed to by the Windows version of profiles.ini.

• Edit the profiles.ini file in the .thunderbird directory (its normally hidden due to it starting with a dot) to point to where you copied the profile. Change IsRelative from 1 to 0 and use the full path in Path. You can edit the file by right clicking on the filename and selecting Open with «Text Editor».

• In the thunderbird directory (where the program is, not the .thunderbird directory that has a incomplete profile and a profiles.ini file) type:

Verify everything is working correctly. Exit Thunderbird.

• Right click on the panel (taskbar), select Add to Panel, Custom application launcher, and then browse to the «thunderbird» shell script. Press OK. Verify it launches Thunderbird. Exit Thunderbird.

• The icon it added was actually a custom application launcher icon.
  • Right click on it.
  • Select properties.
  • Press the square icon on the left side of the window. That will display a «browse icons window».
  • Browse to the thunderbird/icons directory. It won’t list any files. Press the OK button.
  • Now it will list a mozicon16.xpm and a mozicon50.xpm file. Select mozicon50.xpm and press OK.
  • Press close. The icon should change to a Thunderbird icon (blue bird and a envelope).
• Uncheck «view hidden files» in the View menu in the file browser. You’re done.

Note: The exact name and location of the icons depends upon the version. With Thunderbird 3.0 its a default*.png file in thunderbird/chrome/icons/default/ . However, its always a image file whose name mentions «icon» in a icons subdirectory.

Installation alternatives

You can get a copy of Firefox and Thunderbird from many sources. Typically (especially if they’re part of a Linux distribution) they will identify themselves as Mozilla builds in the help menu, but they may not be identical. They may be a trunk build for the next release, and identify themselves as that version even though Mozilla hasn’t released it yet. Or the location its installed in may be modified.

Swiftfox is an optimized build of Firefox. It installs it in the /opt directory. SwiftWeasel has optimized builds for Firefox (Swiftweasel) and Thunderbird (Swiftdove) that are frequently released within a couple of days of a Mozilla release. [1] The Community Builds/Binaries forums has other 3rd party builds.

Automatrix will install Thunderbird and Firefox using apt-get calls to the Ubuntu repositories, but doesn’t provide any update mechanism. Since it’s essentially duplicating what you can do with Synaptic, but Synaptic doesn’t know the package is installed, you’re better off using the package manager.

Ubuntuzilla

Ubuntuzilla is a python script that can install 32bit or 64bit Mozilla builds of Firefox, Thunderbird and/or SeaMonkey under Ubuntu. It provides an option for it to check for updates and notify you. However, the popup is only displayed for a few seconds so you may need to use a checkforupdatetext command if you’re unsure whether a update is available.

Synaptic installs Firefox/Thunderbird in /usr/share. Ubuntuzilla installs the programs in /opt and changes the links to run its version by default. It stores the Thunderbird profile in

/.thunderbird rather than

/.mozilla-thunderbird. You could change the launcher to use the «mozilla-thunderbird» command instead of «thunderbird» if you want to use the one from the Ubuntu repository. While popular, it has a history of causing problems with the Ubuntu version. Its recommended you choose one or the other, not both.

Flatpak , AppImage and Snaps

Flatpak and AppImage are two different formats that attempt to get an application to run on almost any distribution of Linux. This avoids the need to compile from source or use a rolling release Linux distribution (one that supports frequently delivering updates to applications) if you want to use the latest version of the application. Canonical (Ubuntu) is developing Snaps as a similar attempt at packaging an application with its dependencies so that its ready to run and can auto-update. However its currently very Ubuntu specific.

Thunderbird is expected to add AppImage support shortly after Firefox does. A unofficial version of Thunderbird using Flatpak is available at https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.mozilla.Thunderbird .

Cultural differences

Many distributions try to make somebody migrating from Windows more comfortable by hiding many of the differences. A few that you might run into when troubleshooting Firefox or Thunderbird are:

• Any files or folders beginning with a period are hidden. Case matters. Filename. (with a dot at the end) is not the same as Filename (with no dot at the end). Thunderbird won’t display hidden folders in the Attach File(s) window unless «display hidden files and folders» is enabled in the file manager.

• In paths, the directory separator is the forward slash / , not the backslash \ . Also, Unix/Linux paths don’t begin with a «drive letter»: there is a single directory hierarchy covering all currently accessible (i.e. «mounted») filesystems.

• It can be tough finding where stuff is installed since there is no top down hierarchy in the file browser like there is in Windows Explorer, and it installs the software in more directories (not just the equivalent of «\Program Files» and «\Windows»). One advantage of installing something using a package manager front-end such as Synaptic, Adept, Yum, Yast, rpmdrake, up2date etc. rather than typing apt-get or rpm commands in a terminal is typically you can select the package and look in properties to find where it installed the files.

• Executables don’t have standard file extensions. You frequently can’t run an executable directly. When you launch (or type in a terminal) «thunderbird» its actually running a «thunderbird» shell script which calls the «run-mozilla.sh» shell script to run «thunderbird-bin». However, if you double clicked on «thunderbird-bin» (the actual executable) it does nothing.

• The Microsoft power toys have an «open command window here» extension for Windows Explorer. The equivalent in Ubuntu for the file manager would be the nautilus-open-terminal package.

• Some terminal commands are named differently, have different meanings, or for some commands with more than one synonymous names on Dos/Windows, not all of these names are accepted on Linux. Here are a few of the most common of these «renamed» commands:

Dos / Windows	Unix / Linux
cls	clear
cd or chdir (with dirname)	cd (with dirname)
cd or chdir (to home directory)	cd or cd (alone)
cd or chdir (alone)	pwd
md or mkdir	mkdir
rd or rmdir	rmdir
copy name1 name2	cp name1 name2
copy file1+file2+file3 file_n	cat file1 file2 file3 >file_n
type file	cat file
ren	mv
del or erase	rm
dir /w	ls
dir	ls -l

In addition, some commands have different arguments. When in doubt, use man command

/ is your home directory. i.e. /home/eric/downloads and

/downloads are the same directory if you are logged in as eric.

• Typically there is no need to install an anti-virus scanner unless you’re sharing files with a Windows user. If you feel you need one ClamAV is most frequently recommended though most major anti-virus companies have one for Linux. This article compares the anti-virus scanners for Linux. Most free anti-virus scanners won’t intercept your browsers downloads or your mail traffic — they seem focused on users manually launching them to check a file, or scanning most of the hard disk.

Lightning

If you install the Lightning extension from mozilla.org (rather than one provided by your Linux distro) you probably need to also install «libstdc++5» before installing Lightning since most Linux distributions provide «libstdc++6», which is incompatible with Lightning. See Lightning system requirements for more information.

Troubleshooting

• Check that you didn’t accidentally change the case of any subdirectories (or files). Windows doesn’t care about the case, but Linux does.

• Check that all of the files didn’t get changed to read-only (if you burned them to a CD-ROM in order to move them).

• Use a text editor to look at the relative version of any directory settings (they have -rel in the name) and check whether their syntax is compatible with whatever file system you’re using under Linux. Don’t worry about the absolute version of the settings (Thunderbird tries the relative version first), though it wouldn’t hurt to fix them if they’re wrong.

  For example, mail.server.server1.directory points to drive C: (which doesn’t exist under ext3) but mail.server.server1.directory-rel (the relative version of that setting) is still valid, so in that case there is no problem.

  The system requirements state that Thunderbird will not run without the following libraries or packages:

  • GTK+ 2.18 or higher
  • GLib 2.22 or higher
  • Pango 1.14 or higher
  • X.Org 1.0 or higher (1.7 or higher is recommended)
  • libstdc++ 4.3 or higher

  and recommends you also have:

  • NetworkManager 0.7 or higher
  • DBus 1.0 or higher
  • HAL 0.5.8 or higher
  • GNOME 2.16 or higher

  Starting with Thunderbird 12.0 libcanberra will be used rather than esound for sounds. [2]

  Useful resources

  • Psychocats Ubuntu Linux Resources is shorter than most linux guides but is a very useful starting point. Creating a separate home partition in Ubuntu during installation for example is very useful.
  • Linux cookbook
  • Linux documentation guide
  • Linux questions forums has a newbie forum
  • Ubuntu Guide

  Most distributions also have their own forums.