This is a pet-hate of mine that kind of kicked in with Windows XP, but is really bad in Vista.

Vista keeps "guessing" what sort of view I want a folder to display, so it thinks if a folder has images in it, I want them as thumbs, or if it's a bunch of mp3's that I want the columns to be track title etc.  Photo's default to the date the picture was taken.

Now in theory, this is great and lovely, but in reality, it sucks.  Let (shock horror) me decide how I want this to look!

Well there's a fix!

This is a quick and brief run-through of the default Ubuntu 8.04 Server setup I use for all my testing, development environments and tutorials on this blog.  I thought I pop this up here so if you want to follow through the other articles, you have the same starting-off point as me.

This walkthrough is based on installing Ubuntu on a Virtual Machine (running on VMWare), but the steps are the same regardless, so you should be able to follow through on whatever hardware you have.  I won't go into very much detail, it's pretty much a wizard-driven next...next...next process that results in a default Ubuntu Linux, Apache MySQL and PHP setup.