How do I install Ubuntu on my old desktop which functioned perfectly well till I got problems with Windows XP? At the moment all I can do is open a few of the files I saved to my USB. All my Excel and Word files on it cannot be opened though because my trying to improve XP by reinstalling it using the original cd resulted in all the programs I had including Office vanishing.   I cannot go to any webpages either as essential files are missing. My desktop only has 256 MB of RAM. My technical skills are zero unfortunately.
I would like to see a full how-to guide on how to install Ubuntu.
I have a folder on my desktop which is named ".." (which itself contains subfolders with an empty name). The folder can't be deleted the usual ways, even not when using the CLI. Does anyone know how I can remove this folder on Windows Vista 64-bit?  Renaming does not work, either (obviously).  This is what "dir /x" echoes:  09.10.2009  15:04    &lt;DIR&gt;                       . 09.10.2009  15:04    &lt;DIR&gt;                       .. 08.03.2007  11:18    &lt;DIR&gt;                       cgi-bin                0 Datei(en),              0 Bytes                3 Verzeichnis(se), 45.866.037.248 Bytes frei "Give him a box that everyone knows what it contains." "Give him a box that everyone knows what it contains."  Is this correct English? It sounds wrong to me. SQL - Stored Procedure with Select Statement using IN (@Variable_CommaDelimitedListOfIDS) Why am I getting "size mismatch" errors from the Iceland mirror? After installing Ubuntu 12.04 (clean install) I fetch a bunch of program via synaptic (installed specially), all programs worked except Gimp 2.8. So I tried purging Gimp, install again (no luck). Checked broken packages and reinstalled them. When using the Software center I get this MSG:  Failed to fetch http://is.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/o/openexr/libopenexr6_1.6.1-4.1_amd64.deb Size mismatch   Tried also this:  sudo apt-get purge gimp* sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install gimp   And get this MSG:  Failed to fetch http://is.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/o/openexr/libopenexr6_1.6.1-4.1_amd64.deb  Size mismatch E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?   I am wondering if the Icelandic Archive has an outdated version or something?   would really like to install Gimp 2.8 but Gimp 2.6 is OK to.   I am also wondering if I am doing something wrong? The whole multi-continent aspect of A Song of Ice and Fire seems to be getting out of hand. Do the other continents suffer those long winters?  Can the Others harm the other continents?  In The Lord of the Rings there were other realms than Middle-earth, but Middle-earth was still all of humanity and dwarf population and hobbits.  Sure there are stories like Romeo and Juliet where the only thing that matters is whether those 2 are going have a chance to love.  But in these fantasy / sci-fi stories there's usually danger of world domination by evil.  It's not usually just one continent is going to be a terrible (or impossible) place to live but other civilizations will flourish. How do I overload the square-bracket operator in C#? DataGridView, for example, lets you do this:  DataGridView dgv = ...; DataGridViewCell cell = dgv[1,5];   but for the life of me I can't find the documentation on the index/square-bracket operator.  What do they call it?  Where is it implemented?  Can it throw?  How can I do the same thing in my own classes?  ETA: Thanks for all the quick answers.  Briefly: the relevant documentation is under the "Item" property; the way to overload is by declaring a property like public object this[int x, int y]{ get{...}; set{...} }; the indexer for DataGridView does not throw, at least according to the documentation.  It doesn't mention what happens if you supply invalid coordinates.  ETA Again: OK, even though the documentation makes no mention of it (naughty Microsoft!), it turns out that the indexer for DataGridView will in fact throw an ArgumentOutOfRangeException if you supply it with invalid coordinates.  Fair warning. Which way does the scale tip? Linux command line. Move all files and directories in directory, except some files and directories I have a folder A which has files and directories, I want to move all those files and directories to another folder B, except file, file2, directory, and directory2.  How can this be done? 90's book about children climbing a tree and visiting different worlds from there In the 90's I read a book about two children (I think they were siblings, boy and girl) who climbed a tree. At the end they found a door to another world. After some time the (fantasy) worlds switched to another one. Once they got stuck in a world, because the world went on traveling and therefore the door couldn't be reached anymore. They met many curious individuals during their adventures.  It's a completed novel for kids. I've read it in German, but I can't remember if the author was a German one, so it might've been available in English as well. It was a fairly thick book.  EDIT: After some thought I remember a pancake kind of person Tagging best practices I am wondering what I should do when tagging a question that fits multiple tags, in the particular case were the question might belong to general as well as more specific tags.  Let me give you an example to illustrate this:  Let's say I have a question about ASP.NET MVC 3.0 and I use C# as my main language.  The following tags could apply:   c# .net .net-4.0 asp.net asp.net-4.0 asp.net-mvc asp.net-mvc-3   Tagging with C# might make .NET redundant (I don't think C# is used anywhere else outside of the .NET scope), and tagging with  certainly makes  and  redundant. However, my question would get a better visibility with tags such as ,  and , as probably no one browses a tag as specific as .  How shall I tag my questions? Using more general or more specific tags, or a mix of the two? How can I use an align environment flush left? Is there a way possible to imitate the align environment for math mode commands, without having all writing being placed toward the center on the output page?  MWE:  \documentclass{article} \usepackage{mathtools}  \begin{document} \begin{align*} \cos\theta_1 \cos\theta_2-\sin\theta_1\sin\theta_2 &amp;= \cos(\theta_1 +\theta_2) \\ \sin\theta_1 \cos\theta_2 + \cos\theta_1 \sin\theta_2 &amp;= \sin(\theta_1+\theta_2) \end{align*}  \end{document} How can I immediately detect when new files added to a folder within a  script? I would like the script to process files as soon as they are created in the folder. Are there any methods aside from scheduling a  job that checks for new files each minute or so? Community Wiki posts don't change usernames if the user does I have the Xiaomi Mi A3 and I'm currently on both phone and PC latest stock update. I am using Windows 10 20H2 and I have tried everything – but still don't get it. I tried another Mi A3 and it got attached normally. I've tried installing all kind of drivers and different ports, nothing. When suddenly it worked and I installed the stock ROM – but because the stock ROM is kinda laggy and ugly I want to change it. But I can't because I am also on stock recovery and I can't install another recovery because my device isn't recognized in fastboot mode. My device is recognized in adb mode and in edl mode as well, only not in fastboot. Determining a matrix from its characteristic polynomial Let $A\in\mathcal{M}_{n}(K)$, where $K$ is a field. Then, we can obtain the characteristic polynomial of $A$ by simply taking $p(\lambda)=\det(A-\lambda I_n)$, which give us something like $$p(\lambda) = (-1)^n\lambda^n + (-1)^{n-1}(\text{tr } A)\lambda^{n-1} +  \cdots + \det A$$ Now, how can we obtain the matrix $A$ knowing the characteristic polynomial? getting Checkpoint VPN SSL Network Extender working in the command line The official Checkpoint out command line tool from CheckPoint, for setting up a SSL Network Extender VPN is not longer working from the Linux command line. It is also no longer actively supported by CheckPoint.  However, there is a promising  project, that tries to replicate the Java applet for authentication, that talks with the snx command line utility, called snxconnect.   I was trying to put snxconnect text utility to work in Debian Buster, doing:  sudo pip install snxvpn   and  export PYTHONHTTPSVERIFY=0 snxconnect -H checkpoint.hostname -U USER    However, it was mostly dying either with an HTTP error of:   HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently:   or:  Got HTTP response: HTTP/1.1 302 Found   or:  Unexpected response, try again.   What to do about it?  PS. The EndPoint Security VPN official client is working well both in a Mac High Sierra and Windows 10 Pro. Note: The legacy Skype for Linux application (v4.*) is now discontinued and was removed from Canonical’s partner repositories, so this question and its answers are obsolete. Please refer to  of our .    I am receiving the following message while I am trying to install Skype:  nidhin@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get update nidhin@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install skype Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree        Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation:  The following packages have unmet dependencies:  skype : Depends: skype-bin but it is not installable E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages   How can I fix this? I need to install a new TeX/LaTeX/ConTeXt package on my computer.  I'm running Ubuntu/Fedora/Slackware/Some-Version-Of Linux.  What are the possible ways to do this?    Note:&nbsp;&nbsp; We get a number of questions that essentially reduce to this one; it was felt a good idea to have one question-and-answer that can cover all the standard methods.  See  for the discussion.  The question-and-answer are CW so that more information can be easily added.  If you have information to add, please do so.  If you are unsure, leave a comment here or (preferably) in .  Comments on the question and answer will be periodically removed to ensure that the information is clear. I’m studying a PhD in Theoretical Physics (quantum field theory, to be specific), but I would like to learn more about black holes (and related areas. Does anyone have any suggestions for textbooks/available notes on these subjects for people without much background in them? Obviously I’m very comfortable with mathematics and physics in general so I’m not looking for “pop science” material. Is "has or will read" grammatical? I just wrote  in an ELL chat room. But looking at it (or more accurately, listening to my "inner voice" trying to "read it aloud"), I find it bothers me a lot.  A quick check on Google Books finds a claimed 432 written instances of , and 910 instances of , which suggests a significant minority of writers don't have a problem with the fact that the two different read's don't sound the same.  When I check the same construction with other verbs that don't have the same written form for past participle and present tense, it seems people nearly always include both (e.g. :1230, :8; :357, :7).  I'm not usually a big fan of "grammatical rules", but it seems to me there "ought" to be a rule that you shouldn't delete one instance of the verb unless it's "the same" as the one you're keeping. And it also seems to me that since language is primarily spoken, "the same" ought to mean "sounds the same when spoken", not "looks the same when written".  Can anyone who knows more than me about formal rules of grammar settle this one?    As an aside, offhand I can't think of any verb where the past participle and present tense sound the same but are written differently (maybe there aren't any), but would deletion be okay in that case?