first time ubuntu

http://hehe2.net/linuxhowto/3-reasons-why-your-system-might-be-slow/

It's quite interesting. Most of it seems to revolve around watching your system resources. Personally (on lord's suggestion) I'm running conky on my desktop. I get real time updates on my system resources.

So as an unofficial addendum to that article, if you want to keep an eye on your hardware resources at all time then install and configure conky.

Conkys site:

http://conky.sourceforge.net/index.html

Yeah, conky is awsome. But it can be hard to setup. So, here is something that might help:

http://conky.sourceforge.net/docs.html

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Desktop-Environment/Icons/

http://www.playubuntu.com/

http://www.playdeb.net/

http://www.lgdb.org/list_games

http://www.getdeb.net/

The VLC media player is an open source media player,
distributed under the GNU General Public License.
It is a highly portable multimedia player that
supports many audio and video codecs and file
formats as well as DVDs, VCDs and various streaming
protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode
multimedia files and save them into various different formats.

It is one of the most platform-independent players available,

with versions for Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X,

BeOS, BSD, Windows CE, and Solaris.

Install VLC Media player in Ubuntu

You need to make sure that you have a “universe” mirror in your /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install vlc vlc-plugin-esd

This will complete the installation

If you want to open VLC You need to go to Applications—>Sound&Video—>VLC Media Player

Once it open you should see the following screen

VLC Media Player Version Details

VLC Media Player Skins 2 interface

VLC Media Player Skins

Install VLC Plugin for Mozilla Firefox

sudo apt-get install mozilla-plugin-vlc