Skip to main content

Life with Linux

I have been using Ubuntu Linux at home for the last month (courtesy of those folks over at Wubi). Overall I think it is great. So much faster than MS Vista and it helps inject life back into old machines.

However I have spent a fair amount of time configuring and re-configuring things (partly my own fault, and also partly because of the learning curve involved with any new OS). I even had to do one re-install (more on that later). Mostly though it worked out of the box.

So here are a few good ground rules for newbies...

1) Make sure you have more than one Internet enabled computer in the house before you do anything. If for some reason you have a hardware conflict (as I did with the wireless card on my wife's laptop) you will need to look up how to fix it.

2) Most of what you need is available through Synaptic Package Manager or Applications > Add/Remove. If you need a program or driver search there first before the Internet. The only notable exceptions I can think of are Skype and Adobe Flash. Basically Ubuntu has a number of great free programs available which you don't need to install externally.

3) Don't mess around with settings and config files unless you really know what they do. It was this that led me to my re-install, partly because of the next category...

4) When going online for info on configuring your computer, don't automatically use the first solution you read (especially if it asks you to update your settings and config files). Manually updating settings and config files with your text editor should be a LAST resort. More often than not the GUI tools are safer. You wouldn't normally update your Window's registry by hand would you? There are sometimes exceptions, but if an article tells you to go to your terminal and do anything with sudo, vi, pico, rm or gedit think twice. The only exception is sudo apt-get install (which is pretty safe because you are just using the command line version of Synaptic Package Manager). Also be wary of shell scripts (.sh files).

Apart from that I found Ubuntu much faster and easier to install than any Window's distribution (way faster). Provided you have the disk or the files on hand I would say it takes twice as long to install as Vista takes to boot up on an old machine.
Labels:

Comments

codemac said…
It is not that the GUI tools are any "safer", but it's probably more likely for the new linux user to understand what they are changing.

Overall good suggestions for the new to linux crowd. It's practically exactly what I tell my friends when I try to get them on the linux bandwagon.
10:25 AM
Anonymous said…
>1) Make sure you have more than one >Internet enabled computer in the house >before you do anything.

I find that to be good advice no matter what the OS.
8:04 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Master of my domain

Hi All, I just got myself a new domain ( http://www.skuunk.com ). The reason is that Blogspot.com is offering cheap domain via GoDaddy.com and I thought after having this nickname for nigh on 10 years it was time to buy the domain before someone else did (also I read somewhere that using blogspot.com in your domain is the equivalent of an aol.com or hotmail.com email address...shudder...). Of course I forgot that I would have to re-register my blog everywhere (which is taking ages) not to mention set up all my stats stuff again. *sigh*. It's a blogger's life... In any case, don't forget to bookmark the new address and to vote me up on Technorati !
Post a Comment
Read more

Freezing Gems

What is a gem and why would you want to freeze it? In Ruby, there are times when you want to access pieces of functionality that other people of written (3rd party libraries) and you normally have 2 options. You can install a plug in or install a gem. Normally the method you use is determined by which ever is made available by the author. Gems are installed on the host machine and are pretty handy when you want to run things in the command line or else across lots of projects, but their downside is that if you use a gem in a Rails project there is no automatic publishing mechanism when you deploy your site. You will need to log onto the remote host machine and install the gem manually. Plugins are specific to Rails and are similar to gems in that they are also 3rd party libraries. However they are associated with your Rails project as opposed to your machine so they will get posted to the server on a regular deploy. Freezing a gem is the process of transforming a gem into a plug in. Es...
22 comments
Read more

Elixir - destructuring, function overloading and pattern matching

Why am I covering 3 Elixir topics at once? Well, perhaps it is to show you how the three are used together. Individually, any of these 3 are interesting, but combined, they provide you with a means of essentially getting rid of conditionals and spaghetti logic. Consider the following function. def greet_beatle(person) do case person.first_name do "John" -> "Hello John." "Paul" -> "Good day Paul." "George" -> "Georgie boy, how you doing?" "Ringo" -> "What a drummer!" _-> "You are not a Beatle, #{person.first_name}" end end Yeah, it basically works, but there is a big old case statement in there. If you wanted to do something more as well depending on the person, you could easily end up with some spaghetti logic. Let's see how we can simplify this a little. def greet_beatle(%{first_name: first_name}) do case first_name d...
Post a Comment
Read more