Nothing is perfect. Nor is Ubuntu which has set of major as well as minor flaws which do to a certain extent give problem. Minors problems sometimes give us great headaches and sometimes we are too ashamed of asking for help for those problems. Here I have selected few such problems and laid their solutions.

(1) There are no Desktop Icons like My Computer, etc.!

When You have just installed Ubuntu the desktop is clean and have no icons except of various disk partitions and there are no nice little icons for Home, Computer, Trash etc. in the desktop. Well fret not there is a simple solution:

• Press Alt+F2 to get the “Run Application Dialog” and type gconf-editor
• Open apps, then scroll down to nautilus and then choose desktop.
• There are various check boxes for various icons and you can choose whatever in mind.

(2) X or GUI is not loading and fixed with command line!

When In command line type the following command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

and there a text based wizard will launch and just make choices according to your configuration. To be on safe side when asked about Video Driver choose Vesa.

Then Restart the system, and install the proper drivers for your graphics chip. Even if you don’t you only would not be able to play 3D game and wont be able to have Desktop Effects.

(3) How do I install drivers for my nVidia/ATi card?

Go to System->Administration->Restricted Drivers Manager and choose your driver and voila, your (restricted) graphics driver would be installed.

In case you face problem especially in ATi Cards, you can use Envy to install drivers from nVidia/ATi website.

(4) Windows has overwritten my GRUB. How can I run Linux now?

The easiest but the most expensive (expensive in the sense that you have to burn a blank CD, duh!), you can burn a Super GRUB Disk

You can also use Ubuntu installation CD too:

In the live environment.

• Open a terminal window or switch to a tty (Crtl+Alt+F1).
• Type “grub”
• Type “root (hd0,6)”, or whatever your Hard Disk + boot partition numbers are.
• Type “setup (hd0)”, ot whatever your harddisk nr is.
• Quit grub by typing “quit”.
• Reboot.

However you could also use Windows 98 and Windows XP installer CD

• Get Windows 98 boot disk and in the DOS environment: FDISK /MBR
• In WinXP installer CD: Go to recovery console and type command: FIXBOOT

(5) Firefox cannot install flash.

Well indeed Firefox will not automatically install flash.

• Go to Applications->Add/Remove…
• Seach for “flash”.
• In the Show Tab, choose: All Available Applications
• Check Macromedia Flash Plugin (strange it should be Adobe Flash Plugin)
• And Apply Changes.
• Restart Firefox. Flash should work now.

(6) JAVA does not work!

Similar to the above problem, search Java in Add/Remove and install it.

I will add more to the list.