I just installed the latest Ubuntu distro to get my feet wet in the
world of Linux. So far so good. The one thing that's very noticeable is
the slowness of the web. Every time one goes to a new website, there is
a long pause (30+ sec.) where Firefox says it's looking up the site,
Opera says nothing. If one clicks a link within the site being viewed,
there is no pause. As this behaviour seems to be common to both
browsers, I'm thinking it's a problem with Ubuntu and may be able to be
fixed by tweaking some settings. Can someone point me in the right
direction?

Many thanks in advance.

Chris.