My first time install opinions

gaui3d0pnbz86o

So I finally installed Ubuntu Linux. Thought Id share my findings and thoughts on the matter.

First off, Why did I install Linux?

Well Ive nothing against Microsoft but after taking stock of what I use my Pc for I figured, why not give linux a try. After all most programs I use on pc were open souce or freeware. I use the pc for internet, email, photos,music, video, making dvds(from a camcorder) watching divx's. and so on. not really games per say - have a 360 for that. I use firefox and open office and gimp on windows anyway, and i was sure there was decent music ripping and playback software on linux, and same for cd/dvd editing and burning. I was recommended Ubuntu a while ago on boards but I never got to install it for various reasons, and also the download was lost in a formatting. So I redownloaded the ubuntu ISO, and made a bootable cd.

Next up the fun part.
I had a spare hard drive lying around(as you do) and decided to remove the windows hard drive in the machine in case something went wrong, and did a Install on an empty hard drive, let ubuntu keep all its defaults as it installed. all very easy so far. as it was installing thoughts started coming into my head about different problems I had read about online prior to installing, things like getting my network card working, sound, usb drives etc. Installation took about 35 mins alltogether and I set up my user name and password etc. that was it, no problems, could connect to net ok , multi moniter support no problem, sound was grand and working,I have extra buttons on my keyboard(volume control, internet keys, shutdown keys etc, and they all worked too! no extra set up) even my built in memory card reader working no problem. too good to be true I thought!

But I was wrong, next couple of things I thought would stump me, my external USB HDD, a half terrabyte monster filled with my music and photos and so on. plugged it in, the drive its self was partitioned in windows and all were ntfs formatted. all detected ok, i could read all the info(didnt try writing yet, but that doesnt worry me as this is all back up data so I only need read only).

So smooth so far, I havnt had to download anything else(bar the updates for ubuntu which just made sense) not even linux drivers or even use the terminal. Next I set myself a bigger challange, printing to a usb printer that is connected to a windows xp pc in another room via my home network. after about 5 mouse clicks it was set up, couldnt believe it, so simple and it worked, again I didnt need to install anything, it just worked.

Most of the programs I used in windows were pre installed on ubuntu, like openoffice and firefox, using the built in add applications manager I installed all the other programs like mp3 players(xmms) and divx players(vlc), newsgroup reader, etc and That was that.In conclusion, I would say overall it was easier to install then windows, and so far hasnt crashed! Also I can do everything I want and need to do on ubuntu that I could do on windows.

Before I installed ubuntu I had limited Linux experance, as in next to none, but generally very good knowledge of hardware and windows software. I used to do some c++ programming but that was years ago and I cant even write a basic program now nor can I remember how to even compile the stuff. But I hope to get back into it!


Ok so why did I write this, Well Just to say that to people who are thinking about it just try, if you have a spare empty hard drive, you can always disconnect the windows drive and try an install, if it goes wrong, just connect back the other hard drive with windows on it read up on it some more and try again.

Also I had a second motive!(who doesnt)! My final challange I want to set myself is to dual boot the pc, from either of 2 hard drives!Ive put some thought into it and Am wondering which is the best option. I dont know if it is possible to dual boot off a master/slave set up, so im not going to try, should i set both hard drives to master either via either of the ide contrallers (and make the dvd burner a slave) or a an ide controller card. Ubuntu seems to have some kind of boot loader, will this auto detect both windows and ubuntu from this set up and offer me a choice or will I need to install another boot loader and if so on which hard drive?

The above is a minor niggle though, as I can always just change the ide cable over to whichever OS I to boot for now!.

Thanks for reading the above, and I do hope it might be of some use to someone out there thinking about installing linux for themselves.

regards,
Tom

Steveire

I'm in a very similar situation to yourself. I started off with Fedora Core 5 about 2 weeks ago, and I switched to Kubuntu 5.10 just last week to give it a try. I both cases, this has been true:

I didnt need to install anything, it just worked.

Even if I did have to install something, Adept took care of it completely and everything worked automagically. The only annoying thing about Linux is making it work with non-free formats like mp3. It's still a very easy operation with Adept to make most of them work though.

I installed on a windows box with one single partition hard drive. The first thing I had to do then was resize the partition to make unpartitioned space on the drive. I used partition magic, but there are other simple ways. After resizing the windows partition, I made a 6GB FAT32 partition with some of the unpartitioned space. That partition is readable/writeable by both windows and Linux, and is big enough to swap a DVD image if I ever need to do that.

I left the rest of the drive unpartitioned, and the Kubuntu / Fedora installer took care of everything. It detected my windows OS during installation, and let me choose the boot options right then. It uses GRUB as a bootloader, and I have Kubuntu set as my default OS. I'm sure if you connect both of your hard drives at the same time you would get similar options. You would want to read up on that a bit though.

I think the best reason to choose Linux is that if you want a new application, you just choose it from a list, and get it.

Blowfish

Glad to hear you are both enjoying Linux
Anyways it is definitely possible to boot from a master/slave setup. First of all Ubuntu uses the GRUB bootloader by default. Windows will only boot if it thinks it is on the master/first harddrive. I know its possible to mess with the windows bootloader to get it to recognise Linux, but i have no idea how to do this, so i'll show you how to do it the other way around.

First of all put Linux as master and windows as slave.

Next boot Linux and edit the /boot/grub/grub.conf file. One of the very first lines should contain:

timeout=30

After the last line add:

title Start Windows map (hd1) (hd0) map (hd0) (hd1) rootnoverify (hd1,0) makeactive chainloader +1


Reboot and it should work

Because i'm a believer of actually learning rather than just typing in stuff to make it magically work, i'll give an explanation.

The timeout is fairly obvious, it just gives you 30 seconds to choose which OS you want.

title Start Windows - gives you the actual windows option on the bootloader screen

map (hd1) (hd0) map (hd0) (hd1) - hd0 is your master harddrive, and hd1 is the first slave. This 'swaps' them and convinces windows that its on the master.

rootnoverify (hd1, 0) - GRUB won't recognize the windows file system, so this just tells it to ignore that fact and use the first partition on hd1 anyway.

makeactive - makes partition bootable

chainloader +1 - the chainloader is a nice feature of GRUB where instead of running the OS itself, it will simply run the OS's bootloader. +1 means grab the first sector of the partition, which is what you want in this case


Anyway enjoy Linux, and i hope you stick with it

gaui3d0pnbz86o

thanks for the advice blowfish, but unless im missing something(including viewing hidden files) i dont have a grub.conf file!

maybe i have a diferent version or something..... i have a menu.lst file which reads as follows



# menu.lst - See: grub(8), info grub, update-grub(8)
# grub-install(8), grub-floppy(8),
# grub-md5-crypt, /usr/share/doc/grub
# and /usr/share/doc/grub-doc/.

## default num
# Set the default entry to the entry number NUM. Numbering starts from 0, and
# the entry number 0 is the default if the command is not used.
#
# You can specify 'saved' instead of a number. In this case, the default entry
# is the entry saved with the command 'savedefault'.
default 0

## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined).
timeout 3

## hiddenmenu
# Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu)
hiddenmenu

# Pretty colours
#color cyan/blue white/blue

## password passwd
# If used in the first section of a menu file, disable all interactive editing
# control (menu entry editor and command-line) and entries protected by the
# command 'lock'
# e.g. password topsecret
# password --md5 $1$gLhU0/$aW78kHK1QfV3P2b2znUoe/
# password topsecret

#
# examples
#
# title Windows 95/98/NT/2000
# root (hd0,0)
# makeactive
# chainloader +1
#
# title Linux
# root (hd0,1)
# kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 ro
#

#
# Put static boot stanzas before and/or after AUTOMAGIC KERNEL LIST

### BEGIN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST
## lines between the AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST markers will be modified
## by the debian update-grub script except for the default options below

## DO NOT UNCOMMENT THEM, Just edit them to your needs

## ## Start Default Options ##
## default kernel options
## default kernel options for automagic boot options
## If you want special options for specifiv kernels use kopt_x_y_z
## where x.y.z is kernel version. Minor versions can be omitted.
## e.g. kopt=root=/dev/hda1 ro
# kopt=root=/dev/mapper/Ubuntu-root ro

## default grub root device
## e.g. groot=(hd0,0)
# groot=(hd0,0)

## should update-grub create alternative automagic boot options
## e.g. alternative=true
## alternative=false
# alternative=true

## should update-grub lock alternative automagic boot options
## e.g. lockalternative=true
## lockalternative=false
# lockalternative=false

## altoption boot targets option
## multiple altoptions lines are allowed
## e.g. altoptions=(extra menu suffix) extra boot options
## altoptions=(recovery mode) single
# altoptions=(recovery mode) single

## nonaltoption boot targets option
## This option controls options to pass to only the
## primary kernel menu item.
## You can have ONLY one nonaltoptions line
# nonaltoptions=quiet splash

## controls how many kernels should be put into the menu.lst
## only counts the first occurence of a kernel, not the
## alternative kernel options
## e.g. howmany=all
## howmany=7
# howmany=all

## should update-grub create memtest86 boot option
## e.g. memtest86=true
## memtest86=false
# memtest86=true

## ## End Default Options ##

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-10-386
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386 root=/dev/mapper/Ubuntu-root ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.12-10-386
savedefault
boot

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-10-386 (recovery mode)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386 root=/dev/mapper/Ubuntu-root ro single
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.12-10-386
boot

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-9-386
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-386 root=/dev/mapper/Ubuntu-root ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.12-9-386
savedefault
boot

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-9-386 (recovery mode)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-386 root=/dev/mapper/Ubuntu-root ro single
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.12-9-386
boot

title Ubuntu, memtest86+
root (hd0,0)
kernel /memtest86+.bin
boot

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

and a device.map file, which reads as follows(1 line)

(hd0) /dev/hdb


any ideas?

Blowfish

Ah yes your right, different distros of Linux have it named different things, so just edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst and it should be fine