Ok, I guess everyone has noticed the haphazard nature of my posts lately. With my computer on the fritz ever since the Walgreens' Photo Shop incident, I've been haveing nothing but troubles.
Last night a post that I've been working on for about a week, a Chronicles' Project, got all discombobulated, with the HTML going crazy. Beats me.
That was the last straw. I went and bought an 8GB thumb drive, backed up all my pictures, posts, articles, and notes, along with the data files on a couple of other things, and pulled the extra hard drive I had installed which has the pics and a few programs that I would hate to lose.
I reformated the original hard drive, to its original Windows condition, then I put in the Linux Ubunto 9.04 disc that I got from the book store. They sell it in a package with the magazine/manual on the racks. It includes the equivelent of Microsoft Office, Publisher, and Adobe Photoshop. I've used the Open Office word processor, and the Photoshop equivalent - Gimp, and they work almost the same and in some cases better!
Installation was smooth as silk, the partition is done automatically so you don't need to know how it's done.
When the system boots up, you are given the choice of windows, or Ubunto. That's great for the kids so they can keep on doing their thing on Windows, and great for me because now I have a much more stable system!!!
A lot of my stuff got messed up, so it may take me a couple of days to get organized, but I'll be back on track soon enough!
There are a couple of visual nuances that i have noted, but as far as I am concerned, this is a no brainer for those of you that worry about your computer taking a dive, or the Chinese or Russians Bot hacking you into their systems.
At $21.00 at the magazine rack, it is cheap insurance and quite frankly cheap in software terms. You can actually resurrect an older machine with Linux and really get your money's worth out of it!
Best Regards,
Albert
6 comments:
You can also just download it for free online and burn it or Fedora Linux (Free Version of Redhat) or many other flavors of Linux/UNIX as they all pretty much work the same underneath...though Ubuntu seems to be the favorite choice of newbies...to an install disc (PC-Straight UNIX distributions are less newbie friendly)...same with all the documentation and the online docs are more up to date than anything on a book store shelf, just due to the time it takes to get things edited and published.
Been running UNIX of various forms since before Windows or even DOS even existed existed, myself.
Linux (A variant/reverse engineering of UNIX, Ubuntu being a variant of Linux) was a late bloomer for office type work and didn't become truly usable as a desktop for the common man until about 2003 although it and UNIX had much more powerful tools for actual typesetting, networking, and actual commercial level publication and design work than any PC/Mac (they had a steep learning curve and required effort on the part of the user, effort seeming to be a lost idea on most computer users...but that's another rant for another time).
Between then and now, various distributions of Ubuntu are pretty well common man friendly without losing the command line back end accessibility that has always made UNIX, and later Linux as well, the better choice for production level and server work.
If you actually get seriously involved in computing, clicky tools are less efficient than keyboard work. The best websites are created with text editors rather than Dreamweaver or the abortion known as MS Front page, most especially on the commercial scale. Same with CAD and Graphic Design and most especially so with scientific computing and networking.
UNIX and Linux were/are created for free, mostly, by end users for their own use and the use of the community. End users want useful features and reliability.
Commercial Operating Systems are designed for pay to sell and to allow for sale of regular upgrades rather than functionality and bullet proof stability.
It shows in the end products. Hell Mac OS X is just a rip off of code grabbed from a couple UNIX and Linux distributions with a somewhat Apple Computer designed interface. (side note, if you're a Mac OS X type person you an make OS X run on most any hardware if one has the desire as UNIX has always been cross-platform since the advent of various PCs and desktop workstations/servers and OS X is really UNIX underneath, it's a violation of Apple's User License, though, as they like people to run their OS on THEIR hardware...but it's still been done by many).
Welcome to the world of stable computing where you don't have to pay people to fix things, buy software much at all, if ever, and coders actually care, Albert.
Only thing *NIX platforms are weak on is gaming, but I don't do gaming anyway so that's irrelevant to me. If you really want to be a gamer, you're better off buying one of the powerful dedicated gaming systems, not running a PC anyway.
I haven't dealt with windows except under duress for eons although at one point I was a 2k/NT/98/95 admin and fix stuff on broken windows boxes for family at times over the phone. Know my way around it but don't like the way any of it works. My *NIX desktops and servers do exactly what I want and in a stable fashion. Windows and Mac OS X to a lesser extent force you to do things how THEY want you to. My machine, my machines do things MY WAY :-) same as my firearms are tailored to me, not your average walmart shopper. Hard to do such things with the Windows platform without spending a LOT of Money as even to get the backend APIs and such to customize your machine's behavior is like pulling teeth where in *NIX land it's considered the norm, most especially amongst developers.
'Fedora Linux (Free Version of Redhat)'
@Tom, Fedora isn't a Free version of Redhat, that's CentOS.
Fedora is more a testing bed.
@Albert, if you're using Ubuntu you'll find interesting this URLs:
http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://ubuntuforums.org/
and for your friends:
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu
Albert, welcome to the club.
Told you all the Cool Kids use it. ;-)
Computers! Aren't they a wonderful thing, that is when they work right.
Fedora Core is a free variant for developers of Red Hat's distribution. I should have been more specific.
I've been more or less locked out of my windows lappy for the last couple of weeks by, I think, trojans. I get browser stalls logging into sites (like Blogger - hence little posting for a while). I've been toying with getting a dual-boot with ubuntu on my lappy just so I can go online etc. In the end I dug out an old lappy drive with less accumulated rubbish on it while I scrub the other with various anti-bug, anti-trojan software. If I could bring myself to learn how to use the Gimp and get the hand of a linux alternative to Dreamweaver I'd jump ship too (but I haven't).
Enjoy the world of Linux Albert. (A UNIX pedant informed me recently that it's pronounced 'Lyn-ucks' rather than 'Lie-nucks'. So, 'lie-nucks' it is, then!)
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