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Running Ubuntu on parent's PC

Scouzer

Scouzer

Lifer
My mom's pretty good about not busting her computer. All she does on her lappy is surf, email, and Youtube.

I was screwing with Ubuntu for the first time tonight and wow it's FAST! Browsing is WAY faster than Vista for some reason and the OS is very responsive. This was off a USB Drive, so I'd imagine a real install would blaze.

Any downsides? I like the idea that I wouldn't have to worry about it getting virus infested or anything, and she certainly doesn't need any gaming capabilities.

It's a pretty weak computer... an old Inspiron E1405. I can't remember the specs off hand, but it's pretty slow.
 
It's definitely not the fastest, but it's noob friendly, and packs a lot of features into the default loadout.
 
Originally posted by: Scouzer
I was screwing with Ubuntu for the first time tonight and wow it's FAST! [...]

Any downsides?
Click to expand...
Yeah, it's butt fugly - unless you're into rust red and dirt brown! 😀

Also, many of the system settings are (purposely) obfuscated, requiring that you do tweaks from a command line.

I run Ubuntu on a couple of machines, but... I prefer Ubuntu forks for their better interfaces and added functionality!

EDIT Here's a list of "Unofficial Distributions", aka Ubu forks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...official_distributions (Wikipedia article)

Linux Mint 6 (Ubuntu 8.10) and Mint 7 (Ubuntu 9.04) are better packages, all the way around, IMHO.

Since you haven't got a lot of time invested in the native OS, I would suggest giving Mint 7 a whirl.

As far as (limited) resources are concerned, all I can tell you is, I'm running Mint 7 on a lowly Asus Eee PC netbook (900 MHz Celeron CPU) 😉
 
Interesting. Linux is so damn confusing. There's way too many distros out there... gives me a headache. I spent a good half hour trying to figure out how to install graphics card drivers; It's certainly not a piece of cake like Windows. I gave up for the night anyway.
 
I spent a good half hour trying to figure out how to install graphics card drivers;
Click to expand...

You can most likely blame nVidia or ATI for whatever problems you had with that.

Although I'm pretty sure Ubuntu bundles their drivers, all you should have to do is enabled the restricted drivers.

It's certainly not a piece of cake like Windows. I gave up for the night anyway.
Click to expand...

Windows is far from a piece of cake, I can't remember the last time I was less frustrated with a new Windows install compared to a Linux install.
 
Originally posted by: Scouzer
My mom's pretty good about not busting her computer. All she does on her lappy is surf, email, and Youtube.

I was screwing with Ubuntu for the first time tonight and wow it's FAST! Browsing is WAY faster than Vista for some reason and the OS is very responsive. This was off a USB Drive, so I'd imagine a real install would blaze.

Any downsides? I like the idea that I wouldn't have to worry about it getting virus infested or anything, and she certainly doesn't need any gaming capabilities.

It's a pretty weak computer... an old Inspiron E1405. I can't remember the specs off hand, but it's pretty slow.
Click to expand...

If that e1405 takes ddr2 and sata 2.5" like my e1705, spending $50-100 on 2-4gb RAM and $50-100 on a new 7200rpm sata drive will make a HUGE HUGE difference. More so if you go with a SSD instead of a traditional HDD.

That + Ubuntu should make that lappy last another 3-4 years.
 
I've tried Mint 7. For me is the best distro I"ve tested so far. I've going to try kubuntu
Btw What video card you have? You can install the video driver with 2 clicks if you have ATI or Nvidia.
 
Originally posted by: danigr
I've tried Mint 7. For me is the best distro I"ve tested so far. I've going to try kubuntu [...]
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I'm on my lappy, right now, tweaking Mint 7. I dumped Mint 6 (worked great BTW), and I'm setting up my mail & IM accounts, blah, blah, blah...

Takes me about a week to personalize a Linux install, once I decide to run with it. I could obviously do it quicker, but I enjoy putzing around with Mint. 😀

Anyway, that's not the reason I'm taking a break (and typing this)...

What I wanted to tell you is, Clem & Company just released a KDE version of Mint 7 (Kubuntu 9.04, Linux 2.6.28, KDE 4.2.4 and Xorg 7.4):

http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=986 (Linux Mint Blog - Linux Mint 7 ?Gloria? KDE released!)

Since you're a Mint fanboi (too), you might want to give it a shot - dual-boot it, or whatever.

Matter of fact, I got an empty partition on this Toshy. Maybe I'll install it later tonight... 😉

LoL!

I wonder if GRUB is blue or green?!?!?
 
Originally posted by: Scouzer
Great now I can't decide if I want to try Gnome or KDE! lol. KDE blue sure looks nicer though.
Click to expand...
Heh! I *feel* your pain... 😀

KDE is the most popular interface, by far, worldwide.

Gnome is basically a Yankee Doodle Dandy interface.

KDE and Gnome are both in flux, right now, trying to outdo each other - and, in the process, leaving Windows in the starting gate, IMHO.

Personally, I tend to prefer Gnome... but it really depends on the distro.

LoL! Have fun!
 
KDE looks very cartoony to me, I never really got on with it. If the colors are the only thing putting you off Gnome, they can be easily customized to anything you want. I like Ubuntu's stock colors. Mint's ok, and more mainstream in appearance.
 
Blah, I tried Puppy Linux off a live CD and it nuked my Windows install. It managed to FUBAR my sound card drivers somehow, and now the whole OS is bugging out. How the F that happened, I don't know... what a piss off.

Well come to think of it, it could have been Mint that broke everything, I tried them both back to back... annoying. Now I have to format, I formatted only three weeks ago =\
 
Blah, I tried Puppy Linux off a live CD and it nuked my Windows install. It managed to FUBAR my sound card drivers somehow, and now the whole OS is bugging out. How the F that happened, I don't know... what a piss off.
Click to expand...

You nuked your Windows install, I can't say how but no Linux LiveCDs do anything destructive automatically.

THere's a reason Linux only has a 1% market share. It's just not user friendly.
Click to expand...

Linux is plenty friendly, I have a lot less frustrating time doing just about everything than I do with Windows.
 
I set my mom up with a Dell mini 9 with Ubuntu on it about 6 months ago. She hasn't had any issues with Ubuntu at all, all she uses it for is web and email. The only issues she did have ended up being with their wireless router. Aside from that no issues, very small learning curve from windows if you are just looking for something to browse the web and use email. The best part is you really don't have to worry about malware or viruses.
 
Originally posted by: Scouzer
Blah, I tried Puppy Linux off a live CD and it nuked my Windows install [...] How the F that happened, I don't know... what a piss off [...] Now I have to format, I formatted only three weeks ago =\
Click to expand...
Heh! Hard to say what you did (or didn't do) ... 😀

If you're trying to multi-boot your drive, there's some tricks I use that work every time.

Basically, what I do is 'hide' the partitions from each other during installation using GParted - then I edit the GRUB bootloader to 'hide' and 'unhide' the partitions from each other during subsequent boot ups. And, I always write GRUB to the MBR!

GRUB is akin to a MSDOS batch file. GRUB is very powerful and very easy to manipulate using a text editor - just like a Windows batch file.

Simple pimple once you get the concept down!

Do these 2 or 3 things and you'll never have a problem...

Now... If you DO NOT hide the partitions from each other during installation and (later) during each boot up (which most ppl don't) Linux will tend to write data to free blocks in Windows partitions, and Windows will do the same thing in Linux partitions.

Not hiding your partitions is just asking for trouble! It's particularly vexing and problematic when your drive is fragmented - like a ticking time-bomb waiting to explode!

Sometimes (and I mean sometimes) you can get away with multi-booting a drive without hiding the partitions during installation and boot up, but more often than not, in the long run a multi-booted setup will fail if you don't hide the partitions from each other. Might take a minute, a month, or a year, but you WILL have problems down the road, guaranteed!

Conversely, if you 'hide' and 'unhide' your partitions, you can run as many OSs on your drive as you want.

This guy multi-booted 145 operating systems on his PC:
  1. 3 - Dos
    5 - Windows
    137 - Linux
Using this simple principal!

SOURCE: http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=150551

Your PC should be able to handle 2 or 3 OSs, yes? 😉

Hrm...

I'm sitting on a W2K Pro workstation in Phoenix right now, but I'll shell into my server in Atlanta and see if I got any screenies over there that will help.

BBL
 
I'd put Linux Mint on your parent's machine. It's Ubuntu with all the codecs for movies and audio already installed. You install the ATI and nVidia drivers like Ubuntu, though. Worth checking out.
 
The biggest downside, in my opinion, is the lack of software and game availability. If Ubuntu fulfills all your needs, then it's probably a better solution. However, there's so much software and games available for Windows that if you are attached to any significant portion of that, you won't be happy using only Ubuntu.

On the upside, this also makes it less of a target for malware so also more likely to be secure. I toyed around with Ubuntu one time, I was impressed how I could just boot right up into the OS and install it while using it. That was cool. The last time I tried Linux before then, I could never get it to install properly and recognize everything, especially network card. Now it's all automated, works much better than before!
 
Originally posted by: lxskllr
KDE looks very cartoony to me, I never really got on with it. If the colors are the only thing putting you off Gnome, they can be easily customized to anything you want. I like Ubuntu's stock colors. Mint's ok, and more mainstream in appearance.
Click to expand...

I actually prefer KDE version ,using Kubuntu at the moment and it just looks so much better then the standard Ubuntu,


Open Suse 11.1 KDE is ok too but a few quirks I had with that on my PC ie not remembering my res settings,annoying I had to keep setting res right after bootup ,plus too bloated for my tastes.

Linux Mint I have no issues with, it just works and I can see why its a favourite for a lot of users.

 
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