The change to Linux

A little bit of background...

My first computer was a Commodore 64. My Dad purchased it for some exorbitant amount, brand new, mainly to stop me moaning and asking for one continuously, when I was still in high school. On it I learnt very basic BASIC, and had a lot of fun trying to load games with the external tape drive. When I left school and started working, I saved up and purchased a second-hand 486 with 512meg of ram. what a beast! It ran Windows 3.1, and it ran FAST! (well, comparatively speaking, of course) I tinkered, fiddled and dismantled/rebuilt it until it refused to work any more. That was my first experience with a "real" OS.
Things have come a long way since then, through various upgrades, updates and replacements, and I am now sitting in my study, typing away on a relatively new Acer Aspire laptop, which has done me proud for the last few months. It came with Windows Vista installed, which means it's not "cutting edge" new, but does all I want it to do. Well, it did until it had a bit of a haemorrhage last year and Windows decided that it would not play friendly any more.
I have done many installs of Windows over the years, and was dreading the (several) hours of re-installing the OS, hunting for drivers, getting everything to work, etc. This was until I realised that I had no OS disc! What the??
Upon reading through the documentation, I realised that in my excitement to use the shiny new gadget, I hadn't made the obligatory backup system DVD's, and now had nothing to re-install from. I didn't want to put XP on the system, as my version was already installed on my wife's computer, and I didn't really want to go back to 2K, or spend lots of cash getting Win 7, so sat down on my wife's PC (after asking permission first, naturally), and started looking around for a better (free) alternative, and discovered Linux.
Actually, I settled on the Ubuntu version of Linux, which looked pretty sexy by the screenshots and reviews. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) to be exact.



 The Linux Adventure begins...


After downloading the ISO file and burning it to disc, I must admit I was a little excited to see what it would do on my laptop. The screen lit up with a couple of options - I went straight for the install option. Installation was very straightforward - just answer a few questions about you, your location, set a password, tell the partitioner to use the whole drive for the install, and away it went! I sat and watched the slideshow of screenshots and information about features, software, etc until the install had finished, then the big moment came... time to reboot and see if everything had installed correctly.
I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it was a surprise when the lappy booted up. It had sound! And not just a feeble beep from the internal speaker, but full sound through my external speakers and they sounded great. Everything just worked, and I mean EVERYTHING! Networking was up and running, even wireless (just had to supply a password to log onto my wireless router). Built-in webcam and microphone worked. Screen was running full resolution and looked fantastic. To be honest, I was dreading having to hunt for hours to find linux drivers for all the hardware, but I needn't have worried. This was the easiest install of an OS I had ever done, and it took way less that half an hour. I was impressed.
The next week or so was spent poking around the new OS, getting acquainted with it's menus, settings and themes, and installing the NVIDIA driver for my graphics card (which was super easy, it pretty much did it all itself). I spent quite a while checking out the Software Centre and installing programs (a one-click and password affair). I even found programs for using some windows software (such as Virtualbox, WINE and Crossover) which allowed me to run MS Office without a problem.
My thoughts on the new OS? Stable. Fast. Easy. It did everything I asked of it without a hitch. No stumbles and lock-ups, no hardware glitches. Everything just kept working as it should, and it worked very quickly. Windows seemed to just spring open without the wait I was used to with MS Windows. One thing that confused me was the lack of any system tools to defrag the hard drive. What was this all about? I hunted through the menus, thinking that after the install and setting up my programs, the first thing I usually do is defrag to help optimise the system and speed things up a bit. Where was the defrag tool? After a quick hunt online,  I discovered that there was no need to do this, as the OS had a different way of using the hard drive, and pretty much defragged itself as it worked, not causing fragmentation in the first place. "This can't be right" I thought, and despite it taking a few weeks for my distrust to abate, after a year or so of using Linux, have not had any problems with system slowdown like you get in windows. My computer purrs along as quick as the day I installed the OS. Fantastic!

Upgrades

I am no longer using Ubuntu 10.04, despite it being a LTS (Long Term Support) release . I discovered that with the huge range of free Linux distributions available for download, I have become a bit of a "Distro Hopper", trying out different OS's now and then, mainly because they are all free, and I can :-). I have upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) which I used for a while, then to Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal),which I liked, but was not happy with the new "Unity" desktop. I will go into this and a more thorough rundowns of other distros (from a new Linux user's point of view) a bit more in future blogs.
I must admit that I am really impressed with Linux Mint 11. It is my current distro of choice and I will be staying with it for quite a while. It is very similar to Ubuntu, but has a wonderfully easy menu system, using the Gnome desktop. It feels like a slick and professional OS, not quite as "toyish" as Ubuntu. It uses the same software repositories as Ubuntu (and some of it's own additions), so has a huge range of free software available for download (over 33,000 packages at present), and is (in my experience) extremely stable and perhaps a little faster than Ubuntu 11.04.

In overall terms, I am so glad that I decided to try out a Linux OS, and I'm also glad that I chose a very good, easy to install distro like Ubuntu as my first foray into the Linux experience. I can see others choosing a different version, such as Debian to try, then getting confused when faced with command-line instructions and dependencies when trying to install software and drivers. (Of course, you can still work via command line once you learn how in other distros too, but it's not an ideal way to learn unless you are pretty knowledgeable to begin with). The Linux experience, for me, has been nothing but good, and I do not miss Windows in the slightest. In fact, I'm glad to be rid of it. There are still some things that I find easier to do through Windows software,  but I am learning as I go, and I can still do these from inside Linux, so I'm happy with that. I also applaud the fact that now I don't need antivirus software, as Linux is safe from viruses too. I just ensure that I configure a decent firewall (I have them set up in my modem and router too).
To anyone thinking of making the step away from better known, mainstream operating systems, I urge you to give something like Linux Mint or Ubuntu a go. You can download a "Live" CD or DVD image, burn it, then boot off it to try out these OS's, without installing anything on your computer. This is a great way of test-driving a new OS, and will tell you straight up if your computer is capable of running the OS successfully, as everything should work from the word go. You can play around and get a feel for the system, and if you are happy with it, you can double-click the install icon, and away you go! Many distros will also auto-configure a dual boot system during setup, allowing you to keep your Windows OS, and choose which one you want to boot into when you start up your computer. Too easy!
Go on, give it a go! what have you got to lose? There is a whole world of fellow Linux users out there, just like me and only too pleased to help you out and answer any questions you may have. I'm certainly glad I made the change...

Please note: I have no affiliation with any Linux company or group, I just love using it! Scroll down for links to Linux websites below...

Stay tuned for future blogs from DWally...