It all started innocent enough. I was tasked with helping my brother-in-law with a new hard drive install in his laptop. Yeah, I’m the resident techie. Fine I thought. After booting up the Windows XP installer I hit a snag - no hard drive found. WTF? I thought nowadays hard drives comes pre-formatted? Don’t tell me I needed to run a low-level format on this thing? Times like this I know I need the old fdisk but I don’t have anything to boot into DOS to do so.
Then I remembered that I had a copy of Ubuntu around somewhere. OK fine I popped that into the disk and started up the Live version of the OS (means it runs off the CD, no install needed). Then lo-behold a shiny spanking fast OS booted up. This was on a lowly Core Duo laptop with only 512MB of RAM. I ran the disk partitioning tool and walla - the disk is ready to be used. But then I noticed something else - graphics, USB, sound, WiFi, BT, modems, everything was installed and ready to use! I thought WTF, this can’t be Linux! I knew that for Windows XP, I’ll need to download at least a few hundred MB worth of drivers before anything worked (and I did, post install). Then I remember that Hardy comes with fancy 3D effects that rivals even Mac OSX (nevermind the b*tch called Vista) so I digged into the menu. Wait, that’s not right - I only went to System -> Preference -> Appearance and enabled something called “Advanced Effects”. What? That’s it? No more tinkering with X11 settings and downloading of proprietry drivers? Heck, NO NEED TO REBOOT? Hell yeah! Then came another surprise - the speed of which the transparency, multi-desktop and wobbling windows were rendered! These guys are really on to something. I just saw a demo of OSX when my friend bought one, so I trust me when I say Ubuntu is really on-par graphically! OK that was it, I was sold!
I quickly finished the Windows XP install and popped the Ubuntu CD into my work laptop. A behemoth of one, running a Core 2 Duo at 2.4GHz with 2GB of RAM. I thought to myself “Ubuntu would fly on this thing” and it sure did. I’m now on Linux for 2 weeks. I’ve managed to sync my Palm Centro, use BT & WiFi, play MP3s, DVDs and all the other proprietry format (I don’t have DRM stuff so the transition is easier), run Java & Eclipse 3.4, get the latest Firefox with Flash and all the add-ons I love, do instant messaging, setup my email accounts for work & GMail and much more. Heck it even mounts NTFS partitions so I can access my 14GB of MP3s and work documents without me doing much of anything!
Did I install a lot of stuff to have it run what I needed? Nope, I think less than 10. This thing comes with built-in support for the most ridiculous amount of file formats - PDF, ZIP, XLS, DOC, PSD, and much more. Again, much like OSX, it works out of the box. What I did install was Flash for Firefox, Java and Eclipse, a more advanced manager for Compiz Fusion, a dock software, VLC (just for kicks, I use Rythmbox for MP3s, a couple of fonts and Totem movie player for videos), VirtualBox for Windows virtualization and that’s it! I’m still amazed at this modern OS that is faster, graphically pleasaning and more productive. There’s a sticky note software on the desktop, widgets like a calculator, a calendar and a dictionary that pops up just by hitting F9 (again, very similar to OSX), multiple desktops that are STABLE and EASY to use, a new ALT-TAB scheme that is more effective because it shows the actual Windows and desktop regions that can trigger Expose-like effects to see all open Windows (again, like OSX). Oh, and there’s also a desktop search that I think is better than Google Desktop similar to Spotlight on Mac OSX (of course, feel free to install Google Desktop if that’s your thing).
Still, I miss Dreamweaver, Photoshop & Lightroom. I wish Adobe would consider releasing these for Linux. And there’s also the issue of Microsoft Office compatibility. Lucky for me, the laptop is more than capable of running Windows XP in a virtual machine so I still get to use Office documents without rebooting. VirtualBox is magic by itself. Windows boots up in less than 20 seconds in VirtualBox which is pretty damn impressive. And I use that to run MS Office 2007. Total cost of switching to a brand new, modern OS that looks nicer, is more productive, easier to use, has tons of quality software out of the box and more secure? Zero (assuming you already have a copy of licensed Windows to run in that VirtualBox).
I still run Windows XP on my desktop though. For games.
I didn’t manage to record my screen, but there are plenty in YouTube showing what Ubuntu + Compiz Fusion is capable of. The effects shown are overkill, but used subtly, it looks very cool.
Compiz Fusion on Ubuntu 8.04
Can GTalk client be installed in the Ubuntu environment?
Ubuntu comes with Pidgin that supports instant messaging to GTalk.
I had Ubuntu 8.04 on my desktop but ran into sound card issues, then my desktop had to be revived..still didn’t put Ubuntu 8.04 in yet but when i had it on..it was fast n really amazing …will be installing it very soon
What sort of sound card issues? I know there are conflicts with Flash on Firefox 3 with PulseAudio. But a quick command (sudo apt-get install libflashsupport) took care of it. Symptoms - when you run Flash, all audio will stop working.
hi bernie..i’ve seen my friend used this Ubuntu is his notebook..plan to install..does it straight forward which we download from Ubuntu website and just install? can u give us the guideline for dummies like me..:0 .tq
Sam, it’s actually pretty simple, even fool-proof. If I remember correctly, just download an ISO from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download, then proceed to burn it to a CD.
There’s basically 2 options to install Ubuntu in a dual-boot config with Windows. One is using Wubi from Windows. This is the easier and safer method, where Ubuntu will be installed as a file on your existing hard drive, no actual partitioning will take place. There will also be a Add/Remove entry in Windows which will allow you to totally remove Ubuntu. However, this option will offer slower hard drive performance. I went with this install because I had too much data on my laptop to risk it. With this option, all you need to do is to browse to the Ubuntu CD and click on Wubi.exe (autorun will trigger this if you have it enabled). Just follow the on-screen instructions.
The other option would be to actually reboot your computer with the Ubuntu CD in your DVD/CD drive and set your computer to boot from the CD. You’d have to refer to the documentation here: https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/switching/dualboot.html because I didn’t do this. This option is ideal if you’re comfortable with partitioning disks or if Ubuntu is going to be the only OS on your machine. Note that wrongly partitioning your disk can wipe out existing data.
I suggest the first option (installing Ubuntu from Windows via Wubi) unless you’re familiar with Linux already.
Impressive it is.
One question. If we install via Wubi and dual boot Ubuntu with WinXP, and need to use Virtualbox to run Windows within Ubuntu,do we have to go through installing Windows all over again in Virtualbox, or will it read straight from our already installed Windows in the 1st boot option?
pdadr, unfortunately, VirtualBox cannot use any existing installation of Windows, so yeah, you’d still need to reinstall.
If you are certain Ubuntu is the only OS to use, then don’t use Wubi. Wipe out Windows, install Ubuntu as a native OS and then proceed to install VirtualBox. Remember that there is disk performance penalty for using Wubi.
I should have went this route
Thanks for your clarification. Sigh, that means we would have 2 copies worth of harddisk space of WinXP, which is redundant in my limited notebook disk space. And I’m actually not ready to take the plunge to make Ubuntu as the primary native OS as yet.
btw, does WinXP perform as well under Virtualbox as with it’s native OS form?
[...] August 17, 2008 at 10:28 am My previous post on Ubuntu has generated quite an interest. That’s a good thing because of a lot of reasons - avoiding [...]
pdadr,
My Windows install in Virtual Box is only 5GB. It’s barely enough but it works for me. Managed to install Microsoft Office 2007 (the only piece of Microsoft software I actively use) and still have 1.5GB of space left.
Ubuntu takes up roughly 8GB of hard drive with my current setup. I allocated 50GB of disk space in total to it. Not sure how I’m gonna use that up since most of my data files are in Windows (I mount the Windows partition to get to my files). Anyways, unless you’re really hard pressed for space, it’s still workable. You can always dual-boot you know? Not as elegant but it works.
The performance of Windows is surprisingly good in VirtualBox, though I wouldn’t want you to expect native performance, near-native perhaps. Do take into account that Windows freshly installed is always a screamer. In fact, VirtualBox’s Windows out perform my native Windows right now - despite having less RAM (1GB only) and worse disk performance (overhead of VirtualBox virtualization + Wubi). Figure that out
But I know from a technical standpoint, there’s simply no way a virtualized Windows can be faster than a native one. In other words, my native Windows is probably very bloated…
i am using an old sound card la..Creative SB Value…2.1 punya…if can solve this driver issue..will get it on board as soon as possible…
went hunting around regarding this issue..not much info..sob sob..but the advanced video graphics are really good man..my desktop is a AMD Athlon 2000+, 1.5GB RAM, ATI 9550 128mb Video card..can really fly la with Ubuntu…
Ouch, that’s a very old card wooikok. I’m not too sure you can find drivers for that.
I’m guessing it works in Windows eh? Consider an upgrade then, I bet there are some CMedia soundcards that’ll work and those are cheap.
hehe..as long as my old horse works…i will pass….
I’m interested, but wondering. Can this be installed on the UMPC like acer aspire one, ftec ebook, etc. Most of the cheap version comes with Linux, and if this can be done, it would be great.
Boxerism, you would probably need to refer to the forums for each of those UMPC. My only concern if I were to decide to run Linux on those machines is hardware support. So Google your UMPC model + Ubuntu, and see what comes out. You’ll probably hit a guide or two on how to get it running.
Good luck!