8.10 refers to the year and month the distribution was released October (10) 2008 (8)
My advice is never be afraid to google even the slightest problem, because of the community nature of linux and ubuntu, there is pretty much documentation on every problem and several great ways to fix it. It'll take some months to get the hang of it, but it's very rewarding
And about video support, usually in the device manager you can enable the restricted 3D drivers and that will install everything, however if that doesn't work there is a program called "envy ng" (it should be in the synaptic package manager) that'll auto-install the drivers and dependencies so you won't have to do any of that. Oh and if you have to download anything from online .deb files are your friend, but if you use a compressed archive (usually tar.gz) typefrom a terminal
ls (this is the directory command)
tar xzf (filename)
cd (folded just created)
./configure
make
sudo make install
you can get those working great
I've used several distros and Ubuntu is one of the best but a little hard in the beginning, Linux Mint (based on ubuntu) and Mandriva have had better auto setup for me anyway and have a slightly gentler learning curve. Right Now i use Ubuntu 8.04 becuase of a certain proprientary program not supporting webcam Video4Linux 2 and a driver set change with the newest 2.6.27 kernel update.
I've edited this a couple times for more clairity
Kickin' Those Games Old School. - 201 Beaten Games And Counting
