Experiencing Kubuntu on Dell Inspiron 1525

Ordered Kubuntu live CD from Canonical (sister site of Ubuntu.org) which reached my home in 6 weeks.
Have Dell Inspiron 1525 purchased in April 2008. Pre-installed Windows Vista.
Partitioned it into 9 drives.

• 1 Root for ubuntu
• 1 swap partition for ubuntu
• 1 Fat32 partition (Vista)
  
• Rest all NTFS partition (Vista)

I really had tough time configuring Internet connection. Well, at the end i understood that i have goofed up on my username and password.
Well, for first time users this is how to configure ur broadband connection. Mine is a BSNL broadband line. (India)

1. When in Kubuntu, fire up the Terminal.
2. Type in sudo pppoeconf
3. Keep on pressing Enter key for all the questions being asked.
4. Enter the Username and Password when asked. This should be the one given by the ISP(here BSNL) and which u use in Windows to connect to Internet during dial up as by default the BSNL modem works in Bridge mode.
5. Again continue pressing Enter key till the end.
6. Now fire up a browser and check for any site. It will be working.

This above steps has to be done only once. The next time when you open up Kubuntu, you can fire up any website without a hitch.
To stop the net connection, type sudo poff or sudo poff dsl-provider in the Terminal window.

Clock related issue
A problem occured when i installed Ubuntu. The clock was set to a time ahead of the current time.
To solve this changed the time from GUI. But when i fire any sudo commands in the Terminal, i get the following error.
sudo: timestamp too far in the future: Oct 27 22:45:45 2008
To solve this type sudo -k (Clears the timestamp)

Big list of Security Tools available in Ubuntu
ubuntugeek.com/list-of-security-tools-available-in-ubuntu.html

Which version of Ubuntu, type lsb_release -a
Which Kernel Release, type uname -r
Machine's Processor architecture, type uname -m
Hostname, type uname -n
Check out man page of uname, its for displaying System information

Amarok Mp3 Issues
Amarok player does not support mp3 right away. Hence when i clicked on an mp3 file, it asked me for the mp3 codecs. All i had to do was switch on my net connection and click on the download button.
Everything else was taken care of. It not only allowed me to play mp3 but avi files to in Kaffeine.
But when i logged in to the system again later, to my dismay, no sound files were being played. That is it visually appeared as if its playing the file but NO SOUND output.
Well the fix was to open up kMix in the Volume Settings and in the output tab fiddle with the first 3 scroll settings. This also increased my onboard laptop speaker sound output too, since the PCM parameter in kMix was very low. Also changed the Output Plugin to alsa as mentioned in many forums.

WebCam in Kopete IM
Having an Yahoo Account, i just saw my friend online, started to chat. When i clicked on the Invite my WebCam button, it showed me an error saying jasper was not present to show images. A quick search on the net for this informed me that i need to install JasPer program for my webcam to work.
As per the web, installed the program from http://www.ece.uvic.ca/~mdadams/jasper/ . It was a Source Code in a Zip file.
Compiling and Making an executable
Extract all the files from the Zip to say, Desktop
Fire up the Terminal.
Navigate to the Jasper folder inside Desktop folder in the Terminal with the cd command.
Type ./configure
I got the following error in the Terminal.
checking for C compiler default output file name... configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details.
For this i was asked to install the libc6-dev package. For this package go to System -> Adept Manager and type the package name to filter. Just select the package and Click on Request Install button. Rest all is taken care off by ubuntu.
Now, go back to the terminal, and type the same command, ./config
When you get back the command prompt, type make
When you again get back the command prompt, type sudo make install
Give the root password, and wait to get back the command prompt.
This should solve your problem of viewing WebCam in Kopete IM.