There's actually not much to tell here. Ubuntu makes everything extremely simple and easy to understand. I'd played with other Linux distributions before and even FreeBSD (a flavor of Unix) and Ubuntu is by far the easiest to get going. The installation is straight forward and walks you through everything, even a someone new to Linux could follow it.
This installation is on an old Dell CPx which runs a PIII at 500mhz and 128mb of ram. The hard drive is 7gb and the installation hardly used any of that. Let me take a step back and mention that I'd installed the full Ubuntu package with the Gnome desktop prior to this, and it just ran too slowly. After opening up the Gnome Desktop... it barely moved. I wiped the hard drive and re-installed and stuck with only the server base of the distribution.
From there I installed a window manager called Fluxbox. I've used it before on a previous install that I played with and really liked it. It's very minimalistic and hardly uses any resources. Then I worked on installing the programs which I like working with like Firefox, Thunderbird and a few others.
The other great thing about Ubuntu is that it comes loaded with almost everything else you need. During the installation it promted me for my wireless SSID and Encryption key... after it booted I was online. It doesn't get much easier than that.
I will say that I've read about people trying to use Ubuntu on new systems, the only problem with that is the drivers might not have been written for newer hardware yet. In many cases there are workarounds, you just need to put in a little time. Hey, it's free!!
edit: There are some things that I've learned since posting this. If you like the look of Gnome, but prefer the speed of something like fluxbox or blackbox, you can run the gnome-panel in your lightweight shell as long as that window manager is installed. I discovered this through some reading after installing XFCE thinking it would have more eye candy, but still remain lightweight. I was able to run the XFCE panel (xfce4-panel) and wondered if the same would be true for Gnome. It works!
Open up a terminal window and type in: gnome-panel
Now you have a fast window manager, with a highly customizable toolbar!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment