New on kubuntu

[Joel Oliver]

Luis Ordaz wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm new using kubuntu system and i dont even know where to start to 
> play media or to run any programs. can somebody help.
The best place to start here is to enable the medibuntu repositories:  
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu

To play dvd's required the libdvdcss2 package which may be 'illegal' in 
some countries.

Also installing the kubuntu-restricted-extras package will get your 
codecs for most media up to date.  Also look into the vlc media player.  
It "self-contains" all the most common codecs right out of the box and 
is a fantastic player.  There are many choices though and it's all 
personal preference...  Especially with managing your audio collection. 
(Amarok is a great full featured player/organizer but is heavyweight) 
vlc, and many others are lighter with the lightest being the mpg321 
package which plays mp3's right on the command line.

The most important thing for a newbie is to learn how to manage your 
software packages and kubuntu doesn't really impress me in this area 
with the 'adept' manager.  I recommend grabbing the synaptic package 
manager right off the bat.  Drop to a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install synaptic

and enter your password..  Then learning that getting software installed 
by using the repositories and adding new repositories instead of the sad 
Windows way of hunting down software packages by going to the website of 
the software and downloading them one by one (Which is also very 
insecure as many of these 'free' Windows software brings spyware, 
adware, trojans... ect.)

There are some uses of getting certain packages from outside of the 
repositories for some reasons.  Mostly to get the lastest version (such 
as my website http://stinker.serveftp.net:8000 to get the latest svn 
gtk-gnutella software in precompiled .deb and .rpm packages), to get 
"non-free" commecial versions restricted by copyright (Virtualbox comes 
to mind), or to get software which isn't in the repositories (Frostwire 
comes to mind) and the best method of adding repositories (Handbrake is 
an awesome video converting program that requires a ppa to be added, 
there is many ppa's on launchpad for different software)

Welcome to (k)ubuntu!