Ubuntu Linux - Gutsy Gibbon has Arrived!
Well, those who know me know that I am NOT a Linux guru by any stretch of the imagination! But I’ve been tired of using Windows for many years now and could not bring myself to wade through the mud and hassle of installing yet another variant of Linux. I’ve tried Red Hat (version from 1996) and Mandrake (from 2000). Both of which after a few WEEKS of hassle and crap I got to work on my Pentium 133MHz. While I had them, I will not lie, they were nice to have. But along came great video games like Half-Life, Unreal Tournament 2003, followed by Unreal Tournament 2004, and now Half-Life2.
Rather than fuss and wine (yes, pun intended) to get the games to work from Linux I gave in and went back to Win98/Win2k/WinXP. But now, the tide has changed! A friend of mine (www.rustyjr.com) told me about Ubuntu and how it was a much better flavor of Linux. I didnt believe him as I was still skeptical about all Linux. He told me to order the FREE CDs and try their Live version (lets me play w/ Linux without installing it). So I did that. Funny thing was (or at least to me) was when I got the CDs and ran the live distro, Ubuntu not only RECOGNIZED EVERYTHING on my laptop (My Brand New Dell XPS M1710 BTW…) but it did not give me ANY errors! I was astounded!
So, I decided to take the plunge (after verifying that I could in face play HL2 using the newest version of WINE). So I downloaded the latest distro (7.10 - Gutsy Gibbon) and burned the iso. Being the smart guy I am I backed up my important stuff and set to work to put Linux on my system.
Because somethings go wrong sometimes, I decided to dual boot WinXP just in case. I only gave it a 8Gig partition (woah.. very very close to out of space.. 190MB left after XPS Restore CD). Next came the coolest part. Actually installing Ubuntu was very very easy. I put the CD in, booted to the Live distro and ran the install icon on the desktop. It asked basic questions like “where to install”, “where do I live”, “what’s the time” and other basic stuff. Everything else though was done for me. Things like “what’s your video card, what kind of USB stuff do you have, external hard drive (yes).”
So now I’m running Ubuntu as my primary system and so far so good. I am still in need of a few things that I had in WinXP (a DVD to iPod software, iTunes replacement [gtkpod]), but all in all life is good.
Here is a link that I think I’m going to refer to often. If I find more links I’ll post them here for those of you who are non-linux-geeks.
The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” - Page 4 | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials
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October 29th, 2007 at 10:05 pm