Hi! I Just installed Ubuntu MATE and have a couple of questions. What is the package manager both commandline and else. I chose imediatly to upadet firefox and it opened a compressed file with alot of folders and files in them, but none of them wich i could use to update.
What system did you originally come from where you had to extract everything yourself? 
Anyway, some cursory research within Google would suggest Ubuntu MATE is a variant of Ubuntu, which is a successor of Debian made by Canonical Limited. Repositories are handled by anything which use add-apt-repository or otherwise add to directory /etc/apt.
Being that it’s Debian at its core, software for it normally comes in the .deb format and are handled with anything utilizing dpkg or apt, Debian’s package management tools which respectively handle non-repository and in-repository packages.
Canonical has also been advocating its own snap format which use .snap packages, handled by snap. While this is a default feature on all recent Ubuntu systems Canonical has information about retrofitting their snap manager into almost any operating system, as snap packages are intended to be independent of any package manager and “Universal” across supported operating systems.
Use the man command for any of the software I mentioned.
I installed ubuntu MATE from dvd drive and had windows 7 installed on my ssd drive, chose the install along side windows 7 and it automatically took my whole portion of space on my second drive and made it ext 4. Trying to resize the partition with gparted but it seems i cannot do so when i am using Ubuntu MATE on the disk. By the way, is Ubuntu MATE a full size linux distro?
It is a full-size distribution. You should had not simply clicked next to everything if you didn’t want it severing your NTFS partition capacity by half.
###If you’re just done with Ubuntu for the time being_
You should boot into Windows first (or use the recovery environment if you have to) and overwrite the GRUB bootloader with the bootloader your system provides. There is more than enough information about this on the internet, and (at least on older machines) it’s a simple matter of which master boot record is at the beginning of the drive.
Then you can use diskmgtm.msc in Windows to delete the Ext4 partition (which will show as unknown, but healthy) and expand the capacity of the NTFS partition to its original size or perform the same operations in a live session of Ubuntu with gparted. (It comes with Ubuntu MATE but must be installed if not in the live session.)
###If you want to try installing it again…
It is time-consuming to move the contents of a partition, so you may be better off destroying it. For first-time users like you a little extra effort can go a very long way to improving your Linux experience.
####Preparing to retry
You can still delete the Ext4 partition Ubiquity originally made inside of a live session, but when resizing the NTFS partition reserve 48GB (and swap space if desired) for an extended partition. This extended partition will allow you to create (practically) infinite partitions inside of it, which means you aren’t hamstrung by the limit of four physical partitions as defined on most media firmware.
####How to use the remaining space
With that reserved 48GB (and extra for swap space), you can make a 32GB partition for / and a 16GB partition for /home. If swap isn’t of concern, you can write to a swapfile instead, and make that swapfile resident on the NTFS partition where Windows is. (I won’t go into specifics as I hadn’t figured this out entirely myself, yet.)
Why a paltry 16GB for /home? Because you can link in your user files and everything will just work, allowing you to have a small Linux system to play with while making sure the files you make and save outside of Windows can be accessed within Windows later.
####Linking user account directories
Ideally you would first figure out what your user directory is in Windows. If you open Powershell there, you can do ls $USER and get the path you need for ln in your Ubuntu installation later. Let’s assume some things to excise as much ambiguity as I can in explaining this;
Bob has a computer with a Windows installation in an NTFS partition labelled System.
If Bob did ls $USER in Microsoft Powershell on Windows, the directory he would get, provided he used his name for the account would most likely be C:\Users\Bob. After installing Ubuntu as I had recommended above, he’d need to open gnome-disks (part of the installation in Ubuntu MATE) and adjust mount options for the partition named System. If mounted as /mnt/System on boot, he can then mount said partition with the new mount options and create a link with ln as shown;
ln -s ~/.mystuff /mnt/System/Users/Bob
After, he can delete the folders which already exist and perform the same command for everything in that folder he wants. Just one as an example;
rm -rf ~/Downloads && ln -s ~/.mystuff/Downloads ~/Downloads
That would then create a link chain as follows;
/mnt/System/Users/Bob -> ~/.mystuff/Downloads -> ~/Downloads
And the same can be done for Documents, Pictures, Videos and Music, which would stop XDG-compatible applications (such as blueman) from complaining about missing directories, and keep files made inside of the Ubuntu system also available in Windows since they’re going in the same partition Microsoft can read from, in the same places defined by Bob’s registry for library paths in Windows.
So why the initial link called .mystuff? Not only because directories and files which begin with a period are hidden, but also when he invariably screws up and installs Ubuntu again, he only needs to perform one operation to restore his links if he didn’t delete his /home partition;
ln -s /mnt/System ~/.mystuff
####Alternatively with the XDG approach…
He could just use xdg-user-dirs-update instead, but that requires configuration with every system installation, and should only apply when symbolic links aren’t an option. Information about that command can be found here.
1 Like
I cannot delete the ext 4 partition with Ubuntu on it?
I need to resize it without altering the OS on it.
Sorry for the late reply, but you cannot manipulate the partitions which are mounted. Since you can boot into it, it mounts and remains mounted until shutdown, which means you cannot _un_mount it since the system is in use. There’s no going around this when the partition with the installed system is mounted.
You must return to the installation media’s live session to manipulate the system partition, and if you do that it will be hours of time wasted waiting for files to move. In your case it would take much less time to move off the Ext4 partition whatever you want to keep, and destroy the Ext4 partition so you can reinstall the system as you see fit after manipulating the NTFS partition to reclaim as much space for that as you wish.
If you want personalized help which involves remote access, I’m more than willing to perform via remote access in your live session after you install TeamViewer; message me about that rather than continuing that discussion here,