So, the new version of Ubuntu came out yesterday. I wanna try it out. I'm thinking, what's the best way to install it while leaving Windows intact? I wanna stay the hell away from their installer since I've had some bad experiences with it before. I'm thinkning of partitioning my SSD and installing Ubuntu on that separate partition. That way if I ever wanna get rid of Ubuntu I can easily just format that partition and merge it into one again, and not deal with fucking annoying linux/Ubuntu bootloader. The potential problem is, I only have 55 gigs left on my SSD. Is that enough to partition and install Ubuntu, along with whatever software I'll download later on? All my media is on a 1 TB hard drive, so that's not an issue. As far as software, I'll probbaly be looking at VLC, Inkscape, some kind of a music player, Chromium, Audacity, Steam, Skype, 7-zip, Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 toolkits. Another question, I have some linux-supported games installed on my media drive, will I be able to play them in Ubuntu right away, or do I have to reinstall them?
Try it out in virtualbox first and see if you like it
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
And here is how to install it in virtualbox http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jML6nBpSn8
(but you whont be able to play games in virtualbox)
Stay away from Ubuntu; they monitor your searches, and send the data to Amazon for targetted adds; that's why there are products in the Unity search bar. I would recommend Fedora 18 instead of Ubuntu 13.04 in 10 out of 10 cases.
All hateing aside, Ubuntu is a very good platform if you want to start using a linux system, even a dual boot system, it just works like it should.
Another useful linux flavor is zorin6, very easy to learn wihout a long learning curve...
Neither version is a resource hog. But either version can put windows users into extended head scratching sessions because the terminology is so different for doing certain tasks. but it is fun to learn different oses and make them purr.
brennanriddell, well arent there some privacy settings? I can't remember how its called and the hard drive that I had it in died.
I actually already had Ubuntu 11.04 before, and I liked it. I liked it a lot actually. Would've probably switched over to it if I was able to play all my games on it.
yeah, it's one checkbox in the settings to stop sharing data
really if you're super concerned with your search data being used/sold, you are required to burn your computer, because that's the only way to avoid it
I don't agree on that as a whole, but I do agree that the individual user cannot achieve privacy alone unless sacrificing at least in part the ability to freely communicate and access information.
For instance, I really don't understand why a rights-conscious website like teksyndicate.com doesn't offer https. Privacy is a combined effort. I don't care too much about privacy for myself, but I do care about bandwidth, and privacy invasion takes a lot of bandwidth and is just a huge loss of resources. Privacy invasion costs more than it actually brings.
I want to try 13.04, even if it's only going to be supported for 9 months, I hope it's a lot better than 12.10 (well can't get any worse really), and I want to like it, but I'm not expecting much to be honest. I've heard from several friends in my linux enthusiast club that they haven't even been able to boot it up because of major bugs. But tonight I'm admining a GNU/Linux LAN-party (TF2 and Red Eclipse), and I'll hear a lot more feedback, and I'm waiting for that before I try it myself, I don't want to waste my time if it's really that bad.
I was using it for a week before going with Ubuntu 12.04. 13.04 does aesthetically look nicer and Steam runs the same, (though I only played a few indie games on it), but there was an annoying bug that looked like it froze when logging in and the launcher would not show up, even though it did not freeze. The Unity Tweak Tool I was using may have been the cause but it made Unity much better because I liked to hide the launcher and set the bottom right corner to change workspaces and the lower left to show open programs. Other than that one tool, I really did not mess with much, except than adding a user account for my brother, and Firefox, Skype, and Steam worked perfectly fine, which is all I need on my laptop. The only other bug was that the screen turned off after 10 minutes while I was watching YouTube videos, but one could just change the time before lockout to fix that. So far 12.04 has had no problems at all for me, though I do wish the Unity Tweak Tool was available for it because it made Unity so much better
Appreciate everyone's thoughts, but can anybody tell me if partitioning my SSD which has 50 gigs of storage left, and installing Ubuntu on that separate partition is a good idea? I don't want to use virtual box, I want to see the OS as is.
It works good so far, ive been running Ubuntu alongside Windows 7 on my laptop for the past 4 months and haven't found anything to complain about. So far all I see are visual changes.