Originally Posted By: Dignan
I've been using Ubuntu for a while now and I like it a great deal, but I'm still having some difficulty with it. I was wondering if you kind folks could answer a few questions for me.

1 - The main system issue I'm having is that boot up is SLOOOOOW. It takes about 5-10 minutes to boot. I haven't waited that long in years for an OS to boot. I don't think it's a problem with my laptop being slow, because everything runs really smoothly once I'm booted up (I've got all the graphical goodies going and it works just fine). Any ideas?

Slow boot up is likely related to the services that are being started during the boot. Given problem #2, I wonder if it's network initialization that's causing the problem. It may be sitting there, trying to connect to a network (which it can't, due to lack of wireless key) for a while, before it times out and is backgrounded to try again later.

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3 - This seems like a dumb question, but how do I get new icons? I've tried all sorts of stuff, but can never seem to get it to work. I've been adding links on my panel and want to change their icons to something meaningful, but I'm stuck with the default icons.


I know you said Ubuntu, but are you using Ubuntu/Gnome, or KUbuntu/KDE? I can't help with the former, but on the latter, you can just right-click on the panel button, and select "Configure X button". That pops up a properties dialog, with 4 tabs. In the "General" tab (which is probably the tab the dialog starts on), just click on the icon, and it'll open a "Select Icon" dialog.

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5 - Does anyone know of any guide for people who are coming to Linux, preferably Ubuntu-specifically, from Windows and want to learn the basics? The file structure baffles me, I don't know where 99% of the settings for specific tasks are, and (particularly coming from Windows) all this permissions stuff is hard to get used to.

Unfortunately, I can't suggest a guide, as I've never actually read any (the only unix book I've ever purchased and read was "Unix in a Nutshell"). However, if you let us know what's baffling you, I'm sure there's enough folks here who can help sort you out...