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Personally I would not start with Ubuntu. Its like learning how to program with Basic. You learn to many bad habits that don't transfer over to other distros. The best way to learn is to just start using Linux full time. You learn out of necessity. There use to be a live-cd distro out there that was specifically meant for learning commands but I looked and could not find it. I would just start using Linux. Whenever an option of GUI and console comes up use the console. Its honestly not that hard once you understand the basics. Let man be your go to command before Google.

The do block port 25 but you can always call and they will un-block it. I ran a Linux and Windows webserver off of my comcast for years. I recently moved them to hoasgator because I didn't want to maintain them anymore. It is absolutely against there tos but I did it for ages and even told them what I was doing when I called for any reason. They never cared.

Personally I am hopping that this kind of stuff does not become common place. I make my living doing on-site technical support and there are many times that systems need to return with me to my shop for repair. I have a very strict policy of whats none of my buisness. I am paid to fix the computer, I could care less whats on it. However, after a data recovery or even a backup in the case of a nuke and pave I always open a few files to make sure nothing got corrupted. I tend to just randomly click on a few pictures to make sure they open. However, my customers privacy is critical to my buisness. If you break that trust not only would you loose that customer but anyone else that they told. On the subject of kiddie porn or abuse the rules are off the table. While I don't go looking for anything if I stumble across something like this, and definitions aside we all know what that is, then you belong in jail. I'm sorry but you don't f*ck with kids, there’s a line and that crosses it.

Its more then likely a bad drive. Try with the drive plugged in to boot to parted magic or some other Linux live distro and try and mount it from there. Linux can be a lot more forgiving when it comes to hard drive errors. I had a system a few days ago that had 10 years worth of pictures that some lady had not backed up. I could not even run chkdks in the recovery console it was so bad. I booted up in to parted magic and was able to get all of her data back.

The driver on alfa's website is from like 2009 so I didn't even bother, also the other websites discussing this all mention changing the driver doesn't help. The RTL8187 is part of the kernel so I figured it was fine. I got a little improvement playing with the txpower but not much. The access point I am using to test is in my living room about 20' away though one wall so I lowered the txpower to 32mW or 15dBm and was able to make it run as well as it does in Windows. That helps because Windows on this system is just siting on a 30Gb partition because I have a few apps I need for work. This netbook spends 99% of its time in Linux so getting it to work better in Linux is important. Honestly I don't care if I get it working any better in Windows. On the plus side I can hit access points blocks away with this thing. Crank this baby up to 1000mW and I can see access points that I have never seen before from my house.

I got a awus036h about a week ago and I have been having a blast playing with it but I have had a problem that I haven’t been able to work out. Under openSUSE the adapter is extremely slow. I am talking average 300K/s. The Brodcom card in the same system averages over 2Mb/s. I have tried iwconfig wlan1 rate 2M auto to force it to a slower speed thinking that maybe the USB port was getting bombarded but that doesn't make a difference. I also tried it in Windows 7 on the same system with similar results. Windows isn't as bad as it is in Linux but the Alfa is still about half the speed of the built in card. I searched Google and found another post complaining about the same thing in Ubuntu but they had no solutions.