Hi

I just installed Ubuntu 7.04 alongside windowsXP and Fedora Core 6, and was happy to find that after using the restricted modules GUI and then some script after install bcm43xx-fwcutter, both my ATI Radeon XPress 200M card and my Broadcom Airforce one card both Just Worked!
Thrilled. Never got *either* of these to work properly on Fedora. (I was googling my ATI problem a while back, and suddenly it struck me - where were all the people using Ubuntu who were having problems with this card?!!)

Anyway-

Firstly, I tried to access my home folder on my fedora partition and was told that access was denied. Now normally at this point, on fedora etc. I would log into root, and then be able to access whatever I wanted. However, that didn't seem to work, then I remembered that on Ubuntu you have to use "sudo", so I tried this -

sudo cd /media/hda2/home/user

...which didn't seem to work either. How can I get access to my files? And is there anyway I can stay logged in as root rather than sudoing each command (so I could just do cd /media/hda2/home/user, as above)

In addition, now that my ATI card is working, I'd like to have all those 3D desktop effects.
Running " desktop-effects " stated in the GUI window that: "The Composite extension is not available", and in terminal that: "nvidia hardware not available". A quick google revealed that it is possible to use beryl with ATI on AIGLX but only if you use the open-source ATI drivers, and if you have the closed-source driver you must use XGL instead, which also happens to be less stable. Now the open-source drivers for my card are still in the experimental stage, and I'm using the closed-source one instead. Can anyone give me a link to a howto on how to set up beryl with ATI cards (using the closed-source driver) with XGL?


Lastly, If anyone could give me a good faq website on the basics of setting up ubuntu (equivalent to the Unofficial Fedora FAQ fedorafaq.org / etc), that would be great

Thanks.

1. The way I would do it is to open a root terminal, if it's not in your menu (under Applications) then go to System > Preferences?Admin? > Menu Editor and edit the section Applications > System (check root terminal). Now you can 'cd' anywhere. I've never understood why sudo cd doesn't work (but I can assure you it doesn't!).

Most commands run in a sub-shell and sudo requests that the sub-shell be given root privileges.

But "cd" is not a command -- it is a built-in shell function that applies to the current shell.

You can determine this by using the "type" built in function:

maj@ubuntu:~$ type cd
cd is a shell builtin

So another solution is to apply the sudo to bash (or another shell):

maj@ubuntu:~$ sudo bash
root@ubuntu:~#

This might save you some steps.

Mark