A couple of questions from a new user

[Travis Newman]

> 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?

There's a much easier way to do this than using gconf. Open up a 
nautilus window, go to edit -> preferences -> behavior -> always open in 
browser windows

> 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?

You can just rename your .thunderbird direcroty to .mozilla-thunderbird 
and the thunderbird installed in Ubuntu will pick it right up.

> 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?

On ubuntuforums.org, someone posted about apt-get.org. You can search 
for apt repositories that contain the software you want, add their 
repository to your sources.list, install it, then remove the repository 
(or comment it out) from your sources.list.