Ubuntu 10.04
Okay so I’ve been using this new fangled toy for ten days now, so what’s the verdict? Well, it’s not been without it’s headaches to be fair – however I can now share with anyone who’s interested the major pitfall I faced was…
External Harddrives.
So back up the bus a little. I’ve been playing with Ubuntu on and off for about 5 years I guess – never very seriously though and I could never see it being a complete replacement for Windows. Truth be told I still don’t think I can… yet… but it’s showing some serious promise! Back up a little further you say? Okay…
So Ubuntu is a FREE (yes that’s right FREE) operating system based on Linux. It is now without a doubt the most user friendly and fully featured Linux distro (distribution / version / flavour) out there. When I installed it I did the basic system set up (date, time, location) and Ubuntu did the rest. Out of the box I had an OS, browser, games… it even worked with my wireless device in my laptop (always been an issue in the past). Using the integrated package manager I installed a handful of extras – Skype, Chrome and the open source flight sim, Flight Gear. Whammo! Awesome end user experience… until…
Time for homemade pizza. So I whip out my favourite recipe for pizza bases from bestrecipes.com, whip out my external hard drive, unplug the power and move to the kitchen. So now I have a browser still up on the screen but no OS. Um….??? Turns out when I installed Ubuntu, it went for the biggest space it could find – my external hard drive. D’oh. Problem two? It installed it’s boot loader (the bit that allows me to chose between Windows or Linux) on the external hard drive – so when I boot without my system crashes.
So lesson to the wise – don’t install it with a (large) hard drive plugged in.
Lesson learnt, I reinstalled to my laptop hard drive, so now I’m happily using it as my main OS. And when I need Windows? Let’s not shut down and restart, let’s fire up Virtual Box – which allows me to run Windows XP inside Linux. Hell yes! If I really need some of my old apps I can always reboot into Virus… I mean… Vista.
Oh and… another one to watch out for – you may need to disable IPV6 support in Firefox to get your web browsing working. Had all sorts of DNS issues when I first started FF. So how do we do that? Start Firefox, browse to about:config (ignore the warranty warning) and set your filter to IPV6. You should end up seeing a preference called network.dns.disableIPv6. Double click to set this to true, restart Firefox and you’re away.
Happy camper? You bet.
This post tagged as: opensource, ubuntu
01
Jun
your missing the point…windows 7…all the looks of virus with the performance and specs of xp…or you could do what i did and use style xp to reskin xp to look exactly like vista or 7 with no performance change
No YOU’RE missing the point Slinko… Microshaft is evil. OpenSource is awesome. The only prob with OpenSource to date is that’s always been a bit more hands-on techy. Ubuntu 10.04 – not so much. It has speed. It has the sex. It has a HUUUUUUUUUUGE repository of software for every need.
I’ve tried XP, Virus and 7… and until you’ve tried Ubuntu you’re really not qualified to start an argument about it
i tried ubuntu 9.something was cool for like 5 minutes…