well i am running Ubuntu on a old Dell x300 ultra portable laptop 1.4 ghz 640mb ram and 40gb hard drive and it runs really well,
The command line is extremely powerful and - IMO - a much quicker way to get things done. "sudo apt-get install vlc" or "sudo yum install vlc" are far quicker than going to the website, downloading the binaries and then installing through the file explorer That should be more than enough to run Ubuntu. If you start to get a bit more adventurous/experienced, you could also try one of the smaller/slimline Linux distros and get rid of all the stuff you really don't need
I'd say yes on this too. If you want to learn more about how everything works behind the nice interface then you can't go wrong with Linux From Scratch. It is a guide that will help you build your entire distro from scratch. And I mean EVERYTHING. Not for the faint hearted, but it will help you learn a lot about linux in general.
I've just looked that laptop up; seems like it'd make an ideal second machine, they're going really cheap on fleaBay.
well thats what i use it for there is a slight issue with the graphics chip on 10.04 but thats fixed by changing the kernal using the livecd takes all of about 5 mins to sort
I'd actually say that Linux Mint is better than Ubuntu for a novice user, as it has a better menu and all the codecs and flash are already installed out of the box.
Linux is wonderful in that you can customise and play with it to your heart's content. Running it off the live cd has helped me rescue many of my friends' windows machines. At first I dual booted it as I was a bit dubious about moving, but it has proved to be as good if not better than windows at everyday tasks - i've even installed office 2007. forget osx completely. I somehow got ubuntu running on a 450Mhz pentium ii with 384mb of ram... so it's pretty lightweight. There are always other, lighter distros like xubuntu (192MB RAM to run) or even lubuntu (128 MB if you use the command line to install) A group have also made an 'official' ubuntu 10.04 manual: http://ubuntu-manual.org/ and there are countless forums. My personal favourite is http://www.linuxforums.org/ which has a board for people new to linux. Hope this helps any newcomers
I don't have the money to upgrade my laptop so I am going to install ubuntu on my laptop, and remote desktop to my PC for more speed! Also gonna install it on my old pc and use XMBC to make it a simple media player. Along these lines has anyone got a suggestion of a good remote desktop package?
I ran Ubuntu as dual boot for a while, I used it for my uni coding FORTRAN, but I found a good VM setup was far more convenient that rebooting all the time.
Only for the new default theme and the lighter variant of it (ambiance and radiance). If you change to another theme, most have the buttons in the correct corner of the window. You can also download ubuntu-tweak (sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak) which amongst many other things allows you to edit the position of these buttons however you like. My personal favourite feature of 10.04 is the fact that empathy actually works properly now; I never could get it to before now. I boot up and i'm automatically signed in to MSN messenger, facebook chat, google talk, yahoo messenger and a few others I can't remember all in one program. Well, it's between that and the ~4 second shutdown time. This must be blazingly fast on a decent machine. I can't get my desktop to read any ubuntu disk later than 8.10, so I've not tried installing on there yet.
Oh, it is. Ubuntu is a VERY bloated distro, but it's still a way off Windows in terms of running processes. Not having to have an antivirus running 24/7 is probably the biggest change I noticed. There are a ton of lightweight distros to choose from depending on your hardware. (Check out TinyCore)
Thanks for the link plenty of Beef! there I will look at that one two after I have studied the above link thanks
I'm not sure I fully agree here as it depends on what is needed. Minit is great in that you can have a fully working system up and running in no time. This would be ideal for my mother-in-law, but I didn't go down that route when I built her pc as those features would not be of use to her. I actually think that a novice user should pick ubuntu over mint specifically for the reason of not having the basic non-free codecs. As it will mean that the user will have to learn a few basics of how the system works to add the codecs, so in the future when they run into an issue they will know where to look for help and be a little less intimidated.
Ubuntu is a cookie-cutter, I want to do it all without a hassle distro. For many that is an advantage, for a few (like me) it is annoying. But I'm glad you (all) love it I had Kubuntu on my work desktop (Quad core Q9xxx, 4GB RAM) for 2 weeks, and it never felt good. Went to Gentoo with Fluxbox and I am 100 times more "productive" now That is the power and strength of GNU Linux.
