Consider this scenario... You are a Linux neophyte and till a few days back was tied down to using your favorite proprietary OS. But after hearing so much buzz about Linux, you ultimately decided to take the plunge and give Linux a try by installing it on your machine. And going by the popular trend, you zeroed in on (what else?) Ubuntu as your choice of Linux distribution. Now after getting help from one of your geek friends to install it (you could have done it yourselves really), you boot into Ubuntu and you feel...disoriented. You have this jittery feeling that everyone of us have experienced some times in our lives when we are faced with a change. In short you feel lost and are looking for some hand holding regarding working in Ubuntu.This is a common feeling that each one of us initially go through especially when we make the switch to a newer and better operating system which also comes at an unbeatable price. But then one of the chief strengths of GNU/Linux is the strong community support that none of the closed source software product companies could hope to provide.
On this note, Simon Gray has written an excellent article titled - "How to install anything in Ubuntu" - which could put a new Ubuntu user at ease and hand hold him/her in the fine art of installing software packages in Ubuntu. The article is replete with screen shots and explains how to install software packaged in a variety of formats including deb,rpm,tgz, bin and exe. He also dwells on searching for packages in Ubuntu as well as enabling extra repositories to get the software package normally not found in the default official repositories. In short, a very nice article worth spending ones time on.
