Hi! I'm new to UBUNTU!

[calcpage at aol.com]

Hi, everyone, I just installed Ubuntu for the very first time (desktop 
edition 10.04 on 64bit AMD Athlon dualcore) and like what I see so far. 
 I am new to Ubuntu, but not to Debian.

I teach Computer Science at the local High School.  I maintain a lab of 
Linux boxes for my students to login to a remote sftp server I setup 
for them to do projects and save their work.  For the longest time we 
were a KNOPPIX shop (except the server which was Slackware).

This year we got new 64bit hardware and were experimenting all year 
with 64bit distros.  We seemed to home in on Red Hat & gnome 
environments like Fedora, CentOS and Rocks.  We've been having a lot of 
issues with these environments, not the least of which was recognizing 
our dual nics.  Well, Ubuntu recognized them right out of the box and 
even configured them the way we wanted (one public and one private).  I 
think I like the Debian/gnome combo too!

Anyway, I tell you all this by way of introduction so you can 
understand our situation.  We do have a little problem.  We use a lot 
of java enabled sites like www.javawide.org, www.sagenb.org and 
www.screencast-o-matic.com so jre support in a browser is very 
important to us.  I cannot seem to get Firefox to install the jre, 
however.  Is there some trick to this?  Also, I tried to apt-get 
install something simple like bzflag-server and nothing happened.  Do I 
have to update the repository addresses somehow?

We have been playing with linux clusters during the last few years on 
our old 32bit architecture.  We really need a stable 64bit distro to 
base our new 64bit cluster on.  So, any Ubuntu pointers you may want to 
share will be greatly appreciated!

TIA,
A. Jorge Garcia
http://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com

Teacher & Professor
Applied Mathematics, Physics & Computer Science
Baldwin Senior High School & Nassau Community College