Ubuntu 8.04

[billdeg]

Just a quick note - Ubuntu 8.04 is an improvement over earlier versions of Ubuntu, very easy to install / plug and play works well. I have a dual boot laptop (DELL Latitude 840c) that dual boots Ubuntu and Win 2000. The install gave me lots of control, and no fixing was required, it just worked with PCMCIA wireless card/Cantenna setup, etc.

What I liked about it was the ability to get the system running by booting first from CD, connecting to the internet, and THEN installing into a partition of the hard drive. Very nice to be able to test drive first.

This is not a new thing per se, but the smoothness of the install process is what impressed me the most.

Bill

[Trixter]

Ubuntu, with a lot of driver support that works out of the box and daily updates, has really cemented Linux as a desktop OS. My wife was poking around on it and she discovered one thing I didn't know :eek: so I figure that's a success.

You *need* 256 MB RAM to run Ubuntu 8 though. Anything less and it's too pokey to be fun.

[im_an_alien]

You *need* 256 MB RAM to run Ubuntu 8 though. Anything less and it's too pokey to be fun.

If you have less, you can try xubuntu. It uses xfce instead of GNOME, so it runs on older hardware. That's what I use, even though I have 512 megs... If your computer's _really_ old, you can install fluxbox. I dunno about ubuntu, but there's a distro called "DeLi Linux" that can run on a 486 with 16MB of RAM, and it uses fluxbox (or icewm).

[Trixter]

I put xubuntu onto a machine with 192MB RAM and was disappointed (it wasn't that much faster than Ubuntu, in fact I couldn't really tell any difference).

The lower-resource distros work fine, but there is a price you pay for that (for one thing, upgrades are painful... whereas last night I upgraded ubuntu 6.x to 8.x just by running a command and waiting 2 hours, which is pretty damn impressive).

[im_an_alien]

Well this is interesting. I upgraded from 6.x to 8.04 and it automatically installed GNOME... which I've been trying to do anyway. Weird. Now I'm gonna see if I can get compiz to work.

Edit: I got compiz to work. It was easy: install, run. I also installed a Vista Aero theme. It's pretty awesome.

[TroyW]

Sweet, sounds like a suitable distro for me to try out, will grab it during offpeak download hours and give it a go!

[Trixter]

Well this is interesting. I upgraded from 6.x to 8.04 and it automatically installed GNOME... which I've been trying to do anyway. Weird. Now I'm gonna see if I can get compiz to work.

Edit: I got compiz to work. It was easy: install, run. I also installed a Vista Aero theme. It's pretty awesome.

Where did you find the vista aero theme?

[geekygator]

I've got Ubuntu 8.04 running on my old (family) machine (the good stuff can't be touched by people who don't know what they are doing :cool: ), and I must say it has been a great success. Besides the constant whining about how it isn't windows and it makes "A weird noise" on startup, it has been a breeze to administer, simply because my not-so-tech-savvy users can't break it! I must recommend it for anyone who is the caretaker for a system that people who are prone to doing things like installing viruses use, just don't give them the administrator password and you're set.

It also has been pretty handy in my so-far-unsuccessful attempts to get some old computers running, as fdisk is quite handy for formatting things. And I couldn't of put iPodLinux on my iPod without it.