this is what i have done so far: formatter HD installed Win 7 parted of 50% of the drive space installed Ubuntu on the empty half rebooted on reboot the computer took me straight though to windows, bypassing ubuntu completely. i have checked around the net, i have the "time out" on the boot manager set to 30 seconds. so that isnt the issue. any help would be much appreciated as im new to ubuntu. thanks
thanks for the reply, however im uninstalling it again. i liked Ubuntu cos its free no hassle and uses NO resources it didn't need to. there is NO way i am EVER using an OS with that amount of advertising built in.
I haven't tried ubuntu for quite awhile, but not sure what you are talking about with advertising built in? If you want to try a good linux distro maybe try crunchbang. It's even lighter than ubuntu.
theyve added a function so that when you type into the (i think) search bar it brings up a load of "recommended items" from amazon. the thing i liked about linux is getting away from all that rubbish. ill take a look at crunchybag, not heard of it before.
You can turn the amazon search results off in the privacy setting in settings. The version 12.04 is the LTS version and doesn't have this "feature". I generally go with the LTS version unless there is a particular feature or driver included with later releases that is required. Mint is another distro based on ubuntu and has a more traditional desktop. It seems to have risen in popularity recently.
I played with crunchbang in the past, its not really for a beginner tbh and at the time was buggy as hell. Still all on to their own, and easier than Arch. As mentioned the amazon search can be switched off, but also take a good look at the other privacy settings as search entries via unity can also be collected by canonical a feature you can also turn off. Personally I love Ubuntu and don't shoot me.. Unity aswell! Gnome 3 has the feeling its playing catch up with unity, Mate and cinnamon are perfectly fine environments but I have to say KDE is more of a toy and a heavy weight! LXDE to chrome as is KDE is to IE. As to your problem with the dual boot sounds like grub took a dump on you, there are fixes out there tbh it'll be quicker to reinstall it at this stage.
Late reply, but hey. Re: the advertising, that is one reason that I don't use Ubuntu - but rather use Linux Mint which is binary-compatible (you can use Ubuntu packages and repositories). I personally hate Unity (Ubuntu's default interface) so I use the MATE edition of Mint to give me a GNOME2-like menu which effectively replicates the Windows look-and-feel. Give Mint a try and don't let Ubuntu put you off Linux
thanks for the reply all, im gonna retry ubuntu by installing on an external. you all gave some good ideas, no idea which to try now though (too many good ideas )
I would agree with you if it were not for Mint's insistence that you wipe and reinstall on new releases. I like Ubuntu's in-place upgrades. However, I do tend to use LXDE instead of Unity. I am tempted by Cinnamon though.
I personally never liked Ubuntu's upgrades. I'd rather start from afresh than have lots of **** carrying over that I don't want or care about anymore. Also, Mint was nice as you didn't have to piss about with the media repository. S'what I ended up using for about a year and a half I think.
