Recently I installed Ubuntu and thought I might share some of my experiences with it. I am going to break down the entire install process as well as any problems I encountered while doing it.
It started out with Me switching to a clean install of Vista Ultimate edition. Then I decided I had an extra 160gb Hard drive just laying around collecting dust so I went and installed Ubuntu 7.10. The install was very easy and friendly much easier than every windows installation I have ever done. I sat in an internet chat room the entire time it was installing since you actually install from a live CD with everything running from Memory.
The first thing I noticed after I rebooted was that there was now a boot loader that allowed me to choose which operating system I wanted to jump into. This is great because I had a small fear that I was going to have to make my own boot-loader for it but the Ubuntu install did it all it's self. From there just arrow down down to Vista or leave it there for it to load Ubuntu by default.
After that it was a simple matter of putting in your name and password and boom your in. First thing that happened with me once I got in is it wanted to update right away, no delays or anything. First update I noticed is the ability to update to 8.04 right away and off it went updating to the newest release of the OS for me. Lets see Windows do that!
Then it was a simple matter to turn on the Nvidia drivers and everything was golden. Best thing I think is the fact that it has a nice installer feature that catalogs all the programs from the net and lets you choose what you want in it. One suggestion I have on that is search for Wine which gives you the ability to use windows programs in a Linux environment.
So far after a little over a week of using it I have noticed that it is more stable and faster than Vista. Vista on the other hand is more user friendly.
The only real problem I had was getting my SB sound card working as it was the only thing on the computer that didn't work right out of the box with Linux. And even that was fairly simple once I did a quick search on the web for the problem.
One other comment Ubuntu can read the Vista drive on my computer but Vista can not read the Ubuntu drive. So I was able to copy all my media files from the Vista drive to the Ubuntu drive. Which means I have back -ups of the files if anything ever happens to the Vista drive.
