“Ubuntu” ??? Come again???

Ubuntu is a free, great Linux distro. The word Ubuntu means:

Ubuntu is based on Debian and perhaps the hottest distro today. The main difference between Windows and Ubuntu (and most other Linux distros) is that Ubuntu just simply works, out of the box. (As you can already guess, I am somewhat baised on the issue Windows vs Linux…)

I just installed Ubuntu 6.06 (also known as Dapper Drake). The installation, as always was fast and easy. XP installs usually takes about an hour but Ubuntu took a halfhour top.

Do you have to do a lot of manual advanced drive formatting to make Ubuntu happen? If you have a complete HDD to spare for Ubuntu to live on, then you needn’t worry, since the Ubuntu install program takes care of all the nitty gritty formatting. In my case, I rain into some problems when I was trying to install Ubuntu on a dying harddrive, which is a situation not even Ubuntu can handle. When I got hold of the situation, I unplugged the faulty drive and decided to install Ubuntu alongside Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server on my remaining, healthy drive. In Windows Disk Manager, I created a logical 10 GB partition which I formatted as FAT32. Windows won’t allow for Ext2 or Ext3 formatting which is Linux standard format – but the Ubuntu install will reformat from FAT32 to Ext. FAT32 is a format which both Windows and Linux can read and write, so I prepared another 10 GB partition for “Common Data”. FAT32 is better than NTFS for common data, since Linux can’t write on NTFS partitions.

The only thing to remember when you insert the Ubuntu CD is which partition you intend to install it on. Apart from the “root” partition (my 10 GB partition), Ubuntu will need a SWAP partition, which should be at least 256 MB – if you don’t create this partition, Ubunti will create it for you.

All in all, installing Ubuntu is very easy! When you’re done, you have a complete, secure, stable, running OS complete with a office suite (OpenOffice), web browser (Firefox), chat client (GAIM) and Mail client (Thunderbird). Ubuntu also starts and shuts down very fast compared to Windows…

When I upgrade to the latest Ubuntu (called EdgyEft version 6.10) things will be even faster…

If you’re worried about not being able to access your Windoze environment anymore, don’t worry. Ubuntu by default uses GRUB as default boot manager and GRUB will create a boot menu with an option for Windows. You should always install Windows first and Linux second.

And all this with no worries for firewall updates, antivirus software, anti-spyware, anti-malware….

Of course, if you intend to use Ubuntu in a professional server environment, for instance as a web server or mail server, then you should check out firewalls etc. But the desktop client is just that: secure and stable!

A couple of drawbacks with Linux: you have to be a bit of a techie to install new software and playing DVDs and mp3 does not work out of the box. The install issue is because the lack of an install standard in the Linux world – some programs still use old cryptical “unix” style script-based install, or GUI-based install packages like Synaptic, again completely non-standardised like in the Windows world. The DVD and mp3 issue isn’t really a technical drawback but due to licensing reasons in the Linux world – by finding and installing the right software both DVD and mp3 are just fine. But if you want as little hassle as possible for playing DVDs and mp3’s – you should stick to Windows.

Sometimes GRUB will just mysteriously disappear making it impossible to start Ubuntu anymore. This is caused by Windows sometimes overwriting GRUB. When this happens there is a way to make the standard Windows Boot Manager start Ubuntu.

On the subject of Windows….

My XP and 2003 Server environments have been stable enough so far. But it seems like, the more software I install, the more slower, buggier and instable Windows gets. The dreaded “2nd year reinstall” getting closer and closer… It remains to be seen how Ubuntu will behave at this stage.

One of the things I hate most about Windows, is all these cleanup programs i have to run manually on a practically daily basis, just to keep Windows from dragging itself to a crawl. Thank god for free disk cleanup programs like CCleaner and Clone Cleaner Lite. And we haven’t even talked about the Windows Registry, which seems to collect garbage after just a few hours surfing the net… never knew the reason for this. An indispensable program for cleaning up the registry is Registry Mechanic (unfortunely not free…)

Have anyone heard of this problem in Linux? Granted, if I spend 5-10 minutes daily doing this cleanup work, Windows runs fast enough. Even so, is this a professional OS?

Why does Windows bog down at the end of the day? I’ve found that the biggest factor seems to be security. According the Task Manager, the processes consuming the most CPU cycles in Windows are firewall, antivirus and spyware protection software. Every time I start XP or 2003 Server, I always fire up the Task Manager to keep an eye on processes, because I know I have to wait at least 4 minutes before the system goes stable enough to even start a web browser. Is this just me??

Will report back soon about my Ubuntu experiences….