Instead, I took the Windows troubleshooting route and installed from scratch. Unfortunately, even when it booted up off the CD my mouse was still skipping around – and this behavior has carried over to the new installation as well.  I will certainly be fixing this first once I get my standard setup going again.

• installed Ubuntu 8.10 from CD using a guided full disk and default settings
• installed updates as of Jan 25, 2009 (223 updates)

Rebooted after installing updates – when X came back up the mouse was skipping like usual,  hit ctrl-alt-backspace to restart and received this error:  “The greeter application appears to be crashing.  Attempting to use a different one.  <OK>” Clicking OK would reload X – and 3 times in a row I saw this error,  4th time loaded fine and the mouse was not skipping.

• installed NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 177) [Recommended]
• restarted

Mouse skipped on boot again (grr) – this time X restarted without any errors.

Fiddled with System -> Preferences -> NVIDIA settings until I realized that I needed to save my X configuration for the twinview setup I wanted which can’t be done unless it’s in root.  Reran out of terminal as sudo nvidia-settings, saved conf, restarted X.

Installed VLC so I could watch The Shield while I cleaned house.

• Was annoyed that my terminal shortcut keys weren’t in,  went to System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts and set terminal to CTRL+<super>L

• sudo apt-get install vlc

Spat up 47 packages to install + these recommended (nas libdvdcss2 debhelper libqt4-dev mozilla-plugin-vlc videolan-doc)

• sudo apt-get install mozilla-plugin-vlc

• ALT+F2 type: vlc <enter>

Dammit.  Just remember The Shield is on my roommate’s vista machine.  Need to mount his share.

Search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=com.ubuntu%3Aen-US%3Aunofficial&hs=UJE&q=mount+shared+vista+drive+ubuntu&btnG=Search

Click: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=373917

• mkdir ~/shares

• mkdir ~/shares/vista

I didn’t use smbfs as was said on the forum link – earlier when I was reading about samba for windows networking I found that cifs was the more up-to-date and better option,  I’ll try and find the link to where I found that later.  Regardless,  the command is the same.

• sudo mount -t cifs -o username=$USER,password=$PASSWORD //VistaMachineName/downloads /home/kyle/shares/Vista

I don’t like automounting drives =/

• alias vista='sudo mount -t cifs -o username=$USER,password=$PASSWORD //VistaMachineName/downloads /home/kyle/shares/Vista'

Awesome.  Watching The Shield and vacuuming!