A couple of questions from a new user

[Ian Hogben]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hello everyone,

I have moved from a Mandrake 10 system to Ubuntu, and I am pretty
impressed. I am actually a KDE person if given the choice, but I was
drawn to Ubuntu's promise of regular updates with Debian's excellence.
So far, it is all that and more. Once I get things sorted, I am going to
take the plunge and go from warty to hoary. :-) I have a couple of
questions though:

Even though I used KDE in the past, I always used nautilus. It rocks.
only, I am just about ready to throw my laptop through the window. If I
open 20 different directories, then 20 DIFFERENT WINODWS OPEN. Crazy
stuff. Is there an easy way to turn this feature off, or do I have to
hack the configs manually?

While this is not an Ubuntu question per se, it relates to my migration
of data from old system to Ubuntu. I have my .thunderbird directory from
my old thunderbird install, and I am trying to migrate it to the current
install. Saved mail is easy to copy over - you just copy over the
relevant files and it is done. But what about contacts...? Does anyone
know of an easy way to migrate contacts without having exported them first?

I have Ubuntu on a laptop, and there's an ethernet card and wireless
card bult-in. The ethernet card was detected and installed
automagically, but I had to install the ndiswrapper module to get the
Broadcom card happening. Do I need to manually hack the init.d scripts
to have wireless start on boot, or is there a package I can install? On
my Mandrake setup, I had a wlan service that checked the SSIDs and
associated with whatever APs were specified in my config. So I had a few
different SSIDs and WEP keys all configured, and I roamed from one point
to the other. It doesn't look like Ubuntu has that feature natively yet.

Learning apt is .... interesting. After having mastered urpmi, I thought
that apt would be more or less the same. It is much better. I am most
impressed. But a little confused as to how the packages are set up. Is
there a guide as to where to install packages when doing things the "apt
way"? For example, if I want to upgrade Firefox to the latest version
and decide to do it manually and overwrite the apt package, what
prefixes would I need, and stuff like that? Is there an easy to
understand guide on how to create your own .deb package?

Thanks,

Ian.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFBnHoD9nk7B0JWwmARAq8KAJ9a0inScLzs49ZeNxzLaHAdIvoZlgCdG4K/
nYjdf5rb9b21/tMZBrDhstg=
=+ceQ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----