How to Install Anything on Ubuntu

I found a link to an article describing how to install anything on Ubuntu. It's the kind of article I always hope to find when I have a similar technical question. The writer was thinking of someone like me when they wrote it.

New Things to Learn

I need to figure out how to do the following things:

Install Adobe Flash Player for Firefox
Find out if I can receive my email from work
Can I run Windows Office in WINE on Ubuntu?

Those are the biggest items preventing me from using my Ubuntu install as my work-at-home computer.

Now, I need coffee.

67 Updates

I'm trying to setup a firewall. I found Firestarter is the one for Ubuntu, so I attempted to download it. This gave me an opportunity to work with Synaptic package manager. My experience so far with package managers (pm) is with SUSE.

While installing Firestarter, I discovered I had 67 updates that were waiting. I have those going right now. I believe keeping up with updates is crucial to secure computing. I'm going to stay on top of that issue.

What's the root Password?

I tried to su to root to change permissions on a file. When the system prompted me for a password, I realized I had never set one during installation. Did I miss something? Was I sleeping during the installation?

I looked through the Ubuntu forum, www.ubuntux.org and quickly found the following information. A new user asked the same question on the forum and of course, someone quickly pointed the guy in the right direction with a link, but they piled on the typical advice, "Too lazy to look around for yourself?" That's pretty typical with forums.

Anyway, default Ubuntu does not have a root password set.

"su" is not the command to get to root. Instead, I had to type:

sudo passwd

The system prompted me for my password, then it wanted a new password for root. I set one, a complex one and I was off to work again.

Next, I need to install a firewall. I see that Firestarter is the one to use.

First Post about Ubuntu

I installed Ubuntu from a cd the other day after building my Frankenstein computer from three old machines. I had a few hardware troubles getting it together. I used an old hard drive with Windows XP installed to get the machine going. Then I overwrote it with Linspire. That didn't inspire me very much so I installed Ubuntu. That inpired me well enough.

I didn't connect it to the internet until today. I wanted to get it secured first. My next post will describe what I did to secure my Ubuntu installation.