Installing Ubuntu Dapper Drake for the first time…

My story of trying out Ubuntu Dapper, in my own words.

Like I mentioned earlier, I have a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop with (now)1gb RAM and about 33gb hard drive. I decided to roll-back my entire Windows XP Pro to it’s first configuration (as it was when it was shipped to me), of course after backing up my data. I then uninstalled all b.s. programs it came with such as MS everything, Mcfee, Dell/Jasc Paint B.S., Intuit/Quickbooks offer, AOL anything, etc. There is an interesting piece of software out there from this guy at yorkspace.com called the PC De-Crapifier. So cool! It does a lot of this uninstallation work for you, though I personally had to do more work afterwards. Anyways, after doing this, my desktop was pretty clear and my processing was even faster. I love that.

Then I was ready to try out Ubuntu. Out of the 33gb harddrive, Windows was already using almost 7. I decided to have a Windows partition of 14gb, and a Linux one of about 18gb. I gave 1gb to the Linux swap (which I guessed on, since I was using 1gb RAM, though I don’t know if that’s the correct argument). This was very easy to do with the Ubuntu CD - basically it allowed you to manually create your own partitions, and it didn’t ruin any data already there.

From that point, I was ready to start customizing my Ubuntu. Wow, what a pretty interface - simple, clean, and to the point, which is what I like. Though I had to do a lot of self-teaching to figure out how to get around. It’s not like Windows. It’s a little more similar to a Mac. The few commands I knew in Unix helped for the Terminal, which is my favorite way of getting things done - MUCH faster than any graphical interface.

A few things I extremely like:

• everything is highly customizable. things that were decided for you in Windows are not here in Ubuntu - you get to CHOOSE your preferences more
• no need to worry about viruses and such as much- this is a highly stable and protected system, and you don’t need to (?-see comments below) have an anti-virus or firewall constantly running in the background (though you could if you want to be more secure, and you should, apparently, if you are running a server)
• the terminal - unix commands to do stuff fast (must research & learn though)
• you can pick and choose additional software (free!), through add/remove apps in your main app menu, the synaptics package manager (under System - Admin), or through the terminal (manual installation)

A few things I don’t like so much:

• having to relearn how to get around on my computer (the years on Windows I took for granted)
• installed apps not necessarily getting included in the main menu or the tray-UGHH!
• not knowing where installed apps, and their related data, get installed
• the default search in the file browser sucks
• a bunch of ‘default’ processes suck and are much better off being done by other programs you have to install (this is like windows though)
• having to research again which apps are good and which are not

Next, my experiences with various app’s & Kubuntu…