Ubuntu Take 2 - I Think I'm Getting the Hang of Things
First the good news: My laptop finally has access to a working internet connection so the lack of connectivity is no longer a problem with me installing Ubuntu. Now, after last time's slightly rocky start, I decided to take things slow and devote more time to my second shot with Ubuntu. The biggest difference was that this time I used a Jaunty LiveCD. Hey, if a new release is out I might as well go with it.
Start-up was easy like before and the first thing I noticed was a different desktop. It's still brown but slightly plain. Speaking of desktops, I finally figured out that it's possible to change the background image. I didn't actually try it out. I'm keeping that for when I finally install Ubuntu.
Apart from the desktop, I played around with OpenOffice. I'm not a big MSOffice user. As long as it gets the job done, I'm open to pretty much any software. The next stop on the software list was the FastStone Image viewer. I wasn't all that impressed and I'm planning to use XnView once I make the switch. Ditto SMPlayer for my video needs.
As a final plunge, I opened up the terminal and tried out some commands. Nothing too fancy, just some sudo commands and lshw to display a list of hardware on the machine. This is something pretty new for me but I'm sure with practice some of these commands will become second nature to me.
Did I have any problems this time? Yes, one in particular. When I use the touchpad, it suddenly selects an app as I'm scrolling. This happened to me even with the Intrepid CD so it's not a Jaunty thing. I've bought an optical mouse to use so I don't have to rely on the touchpad but it is a little inconvenient.
I read through a bunch of tutorials as well and a lot of them talk about setting a separate /home partition during installation. Assuming I have about 25 GB of space after I set my Windows and swap partitions, how should I divide the remaining two partitions? Another thing I read was that the Master IDE hard disk is referred to as hda. But my partition manager only showed the sda drive. Did I miss something out? Or should I just go ahead and install the two OS's using the side-by-side option and be done with it?
Another dilemma is whether to go with Jaunty or Intrepid? Jaunty seems to have a lot of improvements but is it worth installing so soon or should I hold off on it? Have you installed Jaunty and how are things running for you? Let me know in the comments.
“I can’t see you having any problems with it.”
Unless you’ve got an Intel VGA chipset. Serious performance issues with those. There are workarounds, but they’re not ideal. It’s taken me a couple of weeks to get my laptop performing even remotely close to how it was under Intrepid.
I’d also recommend Jaunty, I’ve used Ubuntu since Gutsy and I can say that Jaunty is perfect and I can’t see you having any problems with it.
I would install ubuntu with Wubi. It works very well. I used it on my laptop every day and it’s not even slow. It doesn’t require a full partition, because it will create a new file on a NTFS partition and use that to mount Linux. I find it pretty convenient if you don’t want to format your computer.
I’d Say go with Jaunty . . I’ve been using it since Saturday (25th-April-09) and its by far the best release I’ve used so far. .
Jaunty has a lot of polish, way more smoother and faster than all the releases i’ve used . .
Also the Notifications in Jaunty is so K0000L ! !
have you tried F-spot for managing your photos?
Yeah, there’s a Linux version of Picasa and it works OK. Only thing is it’s v2 not the improved v3 which is available for Windows and Mac. A shame. Skype’s the same, still being vastly out-dated under Linux. Does the job, though.
Seeing FastStone there really was a shock – I’ve been proselytising this wonderful viewer/editor for ages but never see it mentioned anywhere. Its one of my most used windows programs and as a result I have installed it under Wine in Jaunty. At best its quirky but really it doesn’t work! The image viewers under Gnome are pretty crappy – so I think Picasa is going to be the go. Pretty sure Google have a Linux version….
Hi!
the touchpad fix is easy, all you have to do is system—>preferences—>mouse—>touchpad then uncheck “enable clicks with the touchpad” as far as i know there is no way to change the sensitivity of touchpad clicks. I personally recocmend jaunty as that is what i have on my laptop, Intrepid was nice but a bit slow on my computer, and considering that i have a 2.4 GHz dual core CPU from intel with plenty of RAM, theres really no reason for it to be. as for any issues you might have http://www.ubuntuforums.org is an amazing site for any issues that you might have. just remember to update frequently if you go with jaunty, you want those updates!
I’d definitely say Jaunty is the way to go. It’s got everything the last release had and more. Plus, you gotta have the sweet startup time.
As far as I know, FastStone Image Viewer doesn’t run under Linux unless you are running it using Wine. It’s a Windows program.
I’ve been using Kubuntu Jaunty since alpha 4 and find it works much better for me primarily due to the 2.6.28 kernel (vs. 2.6.27). There may be a version jump for X as well that helps. From touchpads to video adapters to USB Bluetooth adapters, jaunty has “fixed” several problems I had under Intrepid.
sda/hda – what Tom says :)
As for choosing Jaunty or Intrepid – if the LiveCD works fine for you then go for Jaunty. You may as well go for the most recent version.
Separate /home partitions aren’t a bad idea (again, see Tom’s answer). I’ve done that, and a separate /swap, but as I have a dual boot I keep all my data on a FAT32 partition so that both Windows and Ubuntu can see and edit the files easily.
I just upgraded from Intrepid on my laptop and am having a couple of (very minor) niggles which have already been raised. In fact, I think they’re already “fixed” in a couple of release candidate kernels so with luck I should just have to wait a week or two for the issues to be resolved. You find me an incidence of that ever happening with Windows.
Enjoy Ubuntu. I do still use XP and I do like it, but Ubuntu works so much more reliably and quickly on this creaky old laptop that it’s by far and away the most-used on my dual-boot.
Hi,
I would (actually did last week) install Jaunty which works fine for me with the XFCE manager.
I think there is no need to hold off since in my experience thats it with development. We will get updates but nothing special just minor improvement generally not worth to wait.
To hda/sda:
hdX is the “older” synthax for IDE while sdX was reserved for SCSI drives (I think it was something like this).
With SATA drive coming up they thought it is more convenient to name everything with sdX.
And having a separate home partition is very useful in case you have to reinstall your system.
But what
I do is I just keep my data on a separate drive and mount this to my /home directory.
By this the config files are also updated with a clean install and I can keep my data.
Cheers,
Tom