Yesterday – 19th August 2007 - it was a landmark moment for me. I have always considered myself a long-time Microsoft puritan but I have broken the ranks because……..
I have just installed Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) on my machine!! I’ve completely wiped out my hard drive (after backing it all up obviously). I was feeling tense and had palpitations all day long because I am venturing into the great unknown and I have never reformatted my hard drive before. I felt I would be able to cope, digging into my long forgotten IT knowledge/experience for the best part of 90′s and late 80′s. At 3am this morning, Ubuntu is finally up and running. It was easier than I thought – except for a few niggles.
Fintan gave a good tip before diving in head first. You can create a Live CD with Ubuntu on it and run the OS from the DVD/CD drive to try out whether graphics card, printer, network et al are all functioning first. This can be done by booting up the PC with the Live CD in the drive. If you are happy with it, then click on Install icon showing on the desktop and it will do all the installation for you.
My niggles were that the hard drive was playing silly beggars with me. “Install” would not work. So, I forced the main partition into FAT32 (using Gpart) – this is purely guestimation, on my part, cos it was trying to install on ext3 which contains pitiful disk space. I have no idea what that is used for but since I formalise my hard drive as a Linux drive with bootable sector (using Gpart), it did the tricks.
As for the new OS itself, I need to spend a lot more time on it to see the benefits of it. So far, I like it and I have been drool over Gnome Art work available on the internet.
Don’t forget this is a complete change of my computing culture – not unlike trying to drive a left-hand drive car and having to flip your brains the otherways round i.e. I always grab the window handle when I meant to aim for the gear stick.
Any tips and advice would be hugely welcomed here. I am about to add apps onto it in the coming week so if you got a favourite, please do drop a line.
Did Joe hold a gun to your head?
I dunno – can you widgetize that?
Oi! I’m innocent in this case – Tony did say it was Fintan in this case (although I thought he was a Debian man?) and I was on “holiday”
Best advice I can give is to bookmark Ubuntu Forums – http://ubuntuforums.org – it’s a very welcoming and extremely helpful place with many very very patient people that actually take the time to help ya out etc.
As usual I’m always available to give a helping hand whenever Fintan mess it up for you
Excellent stuff, Joe.
I would still appreciate your input where Ubuntu cos you are a user, whereas Fintan is definitely using Debian. I shall be emailing you very shortly about this and pick your brains.
Does anyone else use Ubuntu or is considering about making the switch? Perhaps I could do a running blog series about my experience of my switch to Ubuntu – if you think it is worth doing.
My 1st comment was crap – I dunno why I said that. Must be trying too hard.
Pauline on DUCK made the switch..
Weird.. Don’t know what made 2 people switch in the space of 1 week.. must have been the power of the penguin!
Now that I actually have a spare box, I’m tossing up between making it a server, a linux box, or media centre.
Maybe all three?
Yes, I have ventured into the Ubuntu world but at the moment had a hitch so back with windows. The usual not recognising things, although much better since my dabble with Mandrake and mepis. I have been sent what hopefully is the correct driver and might try again, first with the live edition to see. Had also had probs with updating as it appears you can only use the built in updater and not install from an individual file.
You’ve made a big mistake putting it on FAT32. Either ext2 or ext3 or reiserfs are the ones to go with — they are all faster and much less likely to break (what did you mean by `contains pitiful disk space’? — it shouldn’t be much different to any other). I prefer reiser myself, as it keeps itself in good order so you never need to do a surface scan on startup… even if you do a mains-switched reboot, it will fix itself up in only a couple of seconds.
@ Dale: Thanks for the head up. I have followed your advice but can only do it in ext3 as formatting the said partition in reiserfs came back with errors. The emphasis of my fading IT background is in software and databases -so I am not a hardware guy although I get by.
@ Pauline: I don’t blame you for reverting back to Windows as you need to be a proper geek to troubleshoot on Linux. I need to understand how to use the commands under terminal and find my way around the various adminstrative tools/package manager. It is not very user friendly I have to say.