I have a folder on my desktop into which I've checked out a Netbeans project (my Rails app). I can see the folder on my desktop. I can see the Rails app with LS. Why can I not see the file Rails app by opening the folder on my desktop?

I am running Ubuntu from a USB drive. This required me to do a little hackery with my bootloader. (I used Wubi to install when my Windows install was failing because I couldn't burn CDs because I could only boot to safe mode. Then I migrated the Wubi install from the dying internal drive to the safe external drive. There is a tool and instructions for how to do this linked from the Wubi site, and it reported success, but no joy for me because the bootloaders were borked. I managed to fix it by running Wubi under my dying Windows drive again, making myself a bootable USB key, unplugging the hard drive to boot from the key, reattaching the hard drive, and editing my grub config files in vim.

2009: year of the consumer friendly Linux distribution.

Except, if I forget and leave any of my USB peripherals attached to the computer when I reboot, the ordering of the mounted USB drives gets thrown off and I get told the partition doesn't exist or something like that. sigh power down unplug unplug power up

I obviously can't program for Windows on the machine (I sell software which has to run on Windows or, bam, byebye 90% of my sales) but that isn't Ubuntu's fault. It is, however, mentionable as a source of friction to me.

In addition to my various Windows development environment tools, a lot of things I'm accustomed to Just Working now Just Don't Work. Full-screen Youtube videos? Nope -- I get a nice letterbox bordering the original. CD burner? Not operational yet. Firefox seems to have weird editing issues where every few sentences THERE IT GOES AGAIN my cursor gets moved up a few lines randomly while typing.

I've got a dual monitor setup (laptop and desktop monitor) and wanted to watch a movie on the big one -- one click of maximize while the flash movie (Amazon) was in the big monitor and, bam, it maximized to the smaller laptop screen.

My experience with Japanese support has made me once again thank God for being born speaking the same language as the majority of the world's OSS programmers. I don't know if it is just the Wubi version or the distro I grabbed or what, but it took three restarts before I actually got Japanese on the menus (with one line of instructions helpfully telling me what English I needed to click to accomplish that) downloaded and enabled.

The IME (input method editor) is inconsistent about where it lets you type and, well, am I allowed to say it is grossly inferior to MS's?

Example: "Please give my regards to Yasuda-san" (dirt common name in Japan) should be 安田さんによろしくお伝えください。 or something to that effect (there are acceptable variations for some of the words -- whether you would kanjify yoroshiku or kudasai is a matter of taste more than anything). Instead, the default behavior got me 安ださんによろしくお伝えください。 Please give my regards to an uncommon way to say "is cheap"? (It has since recovered and gets Yasuda right on the first try.)

Finally, and feel free to laugh at me for this one: I spent five minutes looking for the button and couldn't find it so I Googled [where is the button in Ubuntu which I click to open a terminal window]. (I only ever use it through SSH, so that is not normally a problem for me.) I missed it my first three times through the Application menu. I fail at being a poweruser, what can I say ;)