Honestly, i just started using Ubuntu 10.10 on my laptop(installed it yesterday), and have spent a good portion of today playing around with it, although i don't really know much about it, its fairly easy to navigate, and in terms of file management its not different from windows. If you're patient, and don't mind doing some googling i would say you should try it out, its super easy to install(even with another OS) or you can run it directly from the flash drive. I still have windows 7 installed as well, i may not have the most expertise on linux, but i'm trying to be more active on the forums here But in my research of linux, what i was told some of its advantages were, it can run faster than windows(or maybe mac, never used it.. lol) particularly on outdated hardware, or just if your computers not that good. Another advantage which i hope to eventually get to being able to do, is i've heard great things about the customizability of linux, not necessarily with ubuntu(i believe that is one of the more restricted of the linux distros, in the sense that its harder to customize to large extents) Theres probably alot more of advantages but as i said, im still pretty new to it. Are you interested in installing it on a computer or were you just kind of curious about it?
Yeah, i would definite suggest ubuntu then, it was really easy to set up, and you can also just run it from the cd or flash drive if you want(i tried that, but couldn't really get into much for some reason though, it just didn't feel.... right? lol.) But now that i have it installed im starting to like it more and more, and during the install you even have the option to install alongside another OS as well as set up a partition for it(the one issue i had with that is because my partition is only around like 20 gigs or so the screen they had for managing that didn't allow me to see the number of the partition, but i could just move it to the smallest it could be and kind of see an approximate of what size it was, i ended up just using the default setting it gave me). But yeah, all in all i would say its at least worth trying if you're interested, and since i basically only use my laptop for browsing the web and just casual task. The only issue i really had in the install process was it didn't support my wifi thing right away so i had to use an ethernet cord and i was able to just find it in the driver manager.
Check it out and see if you like it! Put ubuntu, kubuntu, slackware, or whatever distro you want onto a flash drive and boot your computer to it. It wont change any settings on your computer or delete anything unless you tell it to, so you have nothing to lose except the amount of time it takes to download. Its entirely free so why not? You will need at least a 1GB flash drive though, unless you want to use DVDs.
Yeah man, thats what im running, i also think the bootloader it came with detected my old copy of 64 bit Vista that i upgraded to win 7, haven't actually tried loading to that though, cause vista was kind of crap... lol
Ubuntu homepage | Ubuntu ubuntu is great for a beginner looking to get into linux, can install or run off a disc (so u dont have to reformat anything or w/e..and just play around with it) has a full GUI...many open source drivers already embedded for most peripherals etc etc the reason linux is better than other OS's is not because of the OS itself...but linux is open source..IE its free..and anyone can modify kernals OS's whatever, its a collective of people across the world programming and having fun with what they make. its not about money or copywrights, just the common goal of making something better
I did the windows desktop download, a message popped up saying "there is no disk in the drive. please insert a disk into drive/device/harddisk1/DR1." It won't go away. -__- I can't use a flashdrive?
Advantages Smaller: can be stripped down and can run faster on cheaper/older hardware Open Source: More customizable File System: Linux supports file systems such as Ext4 which have features that may be very important to you for specific purposes Disadvantages Open Source: With the exception of paid enterprise Linux distros such as Red Hat, you get no official support. You can Google and search forums and ask your friends. That's your support. Not a big deal unless you are in a business environment with high availability requirements. Compatibility: Lots of shit isn't made for Linux Ease of use: It is not built for ease of use in any way. It's built to be powerful and flexible. For example, everything is case sensitive. Much more flexible but also a PITA when you can't remember if something was capitalized or lowercase.
You should be able to use a flashdrive, thats how I installed it on my laptop. However not all computers are able to boot from a flash drive, so you'd have to find that out, I would suggest either googling it or posting what your trying to install it on here and see if someone here can help. However I do believe that in order to be able to boot from a flash drive you have to format it to a Fat32 drive(just regular Fat might work too, but I'm pretty sure mine was Fat32- you can download a program to do so here, just scroll down to USB Disk Storage format tool 1.0 Downloads » Freeware Tools » Page 1 - www.hiren.info). If you go Download | Ubuntu and scroll down to #2 and click on USB stick and then select your OS and click on the show me how thing, and just follow the instructions on there(if you haven't already lol) Hope this helps
I had ubuntu 10.04 a partitioned with Windows 7 a while ago. I only removed it because I wasn't using it as much as I anticipated so I figured I'd just get the 5gbs I set aside for it back... I thought it was a lot of fun (customization wise). I loved how it used little resources as well. It ran pretty smooth (even though I did have trouble with my graphics card driver for a little while). However, I quit using it because of how little it supported. I'm big on photoshop and even using Wine, PS just ran like shit inside Ubuntu. Same with games. Most games weren't supported, and the ones supported with Wine or other similar programs didn't run as well as they did on Windows. Between those problems and the fact that there isn't any support for Netflix (Use it all the time). They have moonlight, but Netflix insists on only silverlight. So if one day that problems with the DRM stuff are fixed and netflix accepts moonlight, someone hit me up, I'll reinstall.