Ubuntu - is it for me?

[Nick W]

Quite a lot of people are saying how good Ubuntu is, and I'm wondering if it's something I should look at, given that my just-over-1-year-old laptop is starting to suffer from the effects of bit-rot.

My Laptop is a Dell Inspiron 6000 with a 1.86GHz Pentium processor and 504MB of RAM. The 80GB disk is less than 50% full. There is also a NEC DVD+-RW model ND-6650A and an SD card port.

I am wirelessly linked to my home network which has another DELL pc of a little age, an Epson Stylus C64 printer on a wireless print server, and a QMS 330 A3 colour laser printer. I use a USB disk drive to back up. I also have a Palm with which I need to HotSync.

I need to be able to run QuickBooks, SketchUp, Alibre, CutList and the usual e-mail and officey type applications (I have OpenOffice as well as MS Office, and am prepared to drop the latter).

Is there anything there that precludes me from using Ubuntu?
How good is WINE? There are other Windoze apps that I like to play with, but these are not necessarily swap-over killers.
If the worst comes to the worst, how easy would it be to swap back again?
Could I run the two OSs side by side easily for a trial period?

I used to work in IT (expired MCSD :roll: ), but managed to avoid having to get into systems management, and have no wish to start now, so the whole process has to be pretty painless. In particular I have a positive hatred of having anything to do with case-sensitive operating systems; I will not do it, I would rather cut out, and eat my own liver.

Or should I just save up for a Mac? Or even let sleeping dogs lie?

 

[Adam]

In particular I have a positive hatred of having anything to do with case-sensitive operating systems; I will not do it, I would rather cut out, and eat my own liver.

That really did make me LOL.

Excellent =D>

Adam

 

[mr]

Hi Nick
I've been using Ubuntu through the last two releases, am now running version 7.04. In my experience pretty much everything about it has been easy to use and all my peripherals have worked. This includes scanner/ printer / digicamera / usb sticks / external dvd burner. The only thing I have found which doesnt work is the iPod. At least the iPod will work as a mountable drive but iTunes will not run under emulation. Apparently a linux version is in the works. Re palm pilot there is a facility inbuilt to Ubuntu 7.04 to connect & sync with palm os devices. I haven't tried it but I could if required.

Re Windows emulation, I have found that Wine will run most things. There is additionally another emulator called Crossover office (not open source). I havent tried the latter.
I use Open Office exclusively and the only problems I have had are opening documents saved with MSOffice as the new default format in Vista which is *.XDOC I believe. Im not overly concerned about this seeing as XP MS office users can't open them either without a layer of fiddling. I don't know about the other applications you mention with the exception of Sketchup which is said to run to some extent under Wine emulation. I cant tell you how well it runs because I dont use it I'm afraid.

You can run Ubuntu and Windows side by side if you want to. The Ubuntu installation proceedure will walk you through this option if you decide to do it. Personally I have a dual boot machine though I rarely boot Windows. My Ubuntu system will happily access and read files stored on the NTFS formatted drives and will reach accross the network to deal with files on my XP based laptop as well. The installation process is simplicity itself, none of the previous linux installation horrors to deal with. Reason I mention this is that you could conceivably install Ubuntu along side windows, leave your data files on the windows partition and work with them from Ubuntu. The files would be accessible from both systems. (though they wouldnt easily be available to Windows if stored on the ubuntu partition) If you work in this way you could then remove the Ubuntu partition if you dont get on with it at no risk to any data that you have on the windows partition.

Another thing worth mentioning is that you can run Ubuntu as a live boot system, download and burn the image to cd and then you can boot to Ubuntu from the cd without having to install it. This would allow you to play with it and test your peripherals and so on. If you find you dont get on with it or your printer won't work or whatever simply yank the cd out, reboot and you're back in windows.

I'm afraid being a linux system it is case sensitive at least at terminal level.

re Macs personally though they look pretty I can't see why, given the available alternatives, anyone would want to pay a premium price for it.

Hope that helps a bit. Shout if theres any other questions.

Cheers Mike

 

[ByronBlack]

Mac is stress free (generally) hence the premium price, and for the fact that apple engineer the majority of the hardware so no poxy driver issues.

Pays your money and take your choice.

I have an intel mac, and have a windows install on parallels which runs better than my now defunct dedicated windows machine.

I'm intrigued by ubuntu though and will test that out via bootcamp - how's about then: Three Os's on one machine - thats value for money!

 

[Dave S]

I agree with Mike with respect to Macs. Also, I've not found them at all intuitive to use when I have had the misfortune to come into contact with them. Personally I'd steer clear.

Ubuntu is one distribution I've not used. It has gained a reputation for being easy to use. I also haven't used Wine. I do, however, have quite a bit of experience with VMWare Workstation which is virtual machine software. Effectively it emulates a pc, onto which you can install the OS of your choice. So I have a Linux distribution with VMWare loaded. I have several virtual machines set up, one with XP, one with 2000 and one with 98. With enough system resources I can run all of these at the same time, all networked.

Ok - sounds a bit geeky, but when I worked in science, my desktop ran Linux with an XP virtual machine on top. I had ocean circulation simulations running for days at a time under Linux and was able to use the XP machine as normal. It is a robust solution. The downside is that vmware doesn't expose all the system resources to the virtual machines. This means I can't do video editing, for example, on my virtual machines, so I keep the dual boot option for this. (There are, of course, Linux options for this, but I've yet to investigate them).

I think the cost of VMWare is currently about £85 for the download version. It might not be the thing for you - although it's pretty easy to use, it sounds like you don't want to spend much time tinkering. However, I throw it into the ring as something to consider.

Dave

 

[Nick W]

Thanks Chaps. A good deal to ponder there.

 

[Nick W]

OK, so I've made an Ubuntu CD, but my system still boots to Windoze. Is it because it is a DVD drive, or is there some setting, somewhere that I need to change?

 

[wizer]

you need to set your bios to boot from the cd drive

 

[Nick W]

you need to set your bios to boot from the cd drive

Uh?

 

[wizer]

when the PC first boots you will get either a boot option or an option to enter the bios. In the bios screens you need to set the boot order. The first boot option needs to be the IDE CD/DVD drive

 

[mr]

On booting the machine hit (usually) F1 to enter the bios setup, then locate the drive boot order and set the cd rom device to be the first bootable drive, save and exit. What this means is that when you boot on future the machine will look at the cd drive first and then at the hard drive if there's nothing bootable in the cd drive. Meaning that you can boot something like an Ubuntu live distro rather than Windows.

Cheers Mike

 

[Nick W]

Thanks Mike, that sorted it, though it was F2 on my machine (but what's an F between friends?). Next task is to work out how to get to access my wireless network.

I'll take it that the sluggish performance is down to it being run from CD for the mo.

 

[mr]

IT can only run as fast as your cd drive can spin at the moment. Everything has to be loaded into ram before use etc so it may well be a bit sluggish. You should be able to set up your network connections from the network settings widget which you'll find at system | administration | network

Cheers Mike

 

[stewart]

Does all/most software work with ubuntu? I'm thinking of stuff from serif, photoshop, world of warcraft?
Have got a copy on cd and like the look of it but don't want to instal it if software is limited

 

[mr]

Hi Stewart

NO idea about Serif, (what is it ?)
WOW does run
Photoshop does run apparently though I havent tried it.

The point though is that there are open source alternatives to most things. Photoshop for example can be replaced with the Gimp, Illustrator with Xara Xtreme, MSOffice with Open Office and so on. Theres very little that I've run across that can't be replaced with an open source alternative. Macromedia / Adobe Director can't which is the only thing I can think of at the moment.

Will your cd boot? If its a proper Canonical Ubuntu cd then it will and you can try it out without installing or changing anything on your machine.
Cheers Mike

 

[stewart]

Thanks for the reply, Mike.
I've put ubuntu onto cd and can boot from it - I'll have to instal it to a hard drive to see if my serif programs work - they make a photoeditor and dtp program i use, as well as a movie editing one.
I like the look of beryl but can't work out how to instal it I'll have a play with ubuntu first and then try beryl later!
Thanks for your help

 

[mr]

Hi Stewart
You wont be able to install anything to run under Ubuntu - ie Beryl unless you have installed Ubuntu itself. Running from cd allows you to run the various parts of the system & the apps that are packed with the version you have on disk. Other bits & bobs have to be installed onto an installed system if you see what I mean. Once you have that installation I've found most further application installations to be quite simple - including Beryl which I was having horrors about before I did it. Having said that regarding Beryl (& other apps which depend on your graphics card) your milage might vary, you might find it a nightmare, to a certain extent it might depend on your pc and the hardware in it.

Cheers Mike

 

[Steve Maskery]

All this is double-dutch to me, so I went a-hunting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SWTW6CAYFQ

I'm not really any the wiser, but it looks good.

Will it run Adobe Premier Pro?

Cheers
Steve

 

[wizer]

Steve it is unlikely that it will run as well and as easily as it does on a windows based machine. That said there are applications much better than premier pro which run much faster and more efficiently on a linux based machine. I run Linux and XP side by side at work and only really use Linux for bespoke work related applications. XP has never really been a problem for me tbh. Only thing that bothers me about windows based PC's is that they are resource hungry.

That said I am going to try ubuntu on my laptop (almost exclusively used for web browsing) until Vista is a bit more established.

 

[Steve Maskery]

That said there are applications much better than premier pro which run much faster and more efficiently on a linux based machine.

PC's ... are resource hungry.

Do you have any recommendations?

Cheers
Steve