Well this weekend I decided to skip mini distrabutions and go for another larger install, I still dont really want to install Debian or Fedora Core, so I decided this time I'd look at the screenshots and see what my cup of tea was.

So first thing was first, boot into Puppy and backup my personal stuff, so on goes my old PC and it boots perfectly as normal, up until it comes to starting the window manger (X), it doesnt load, so I type "xwin" and it doesnt start, it just says to xwin if I want to restart the interface.

So at that point, I really cant be bothered, so I head over to my drawer, and find a spare 8.5GB hard drive, it hadnt ever worked before, windows couldnt even detect it. I plugged it in, and as usual, the computer couldnt even find it to boot from.

I at this point, decide im going to install over puppy on my 3GB hard drive, so I goto my main PC (Win XP) and remember about Unbuntu, so I head to their site http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ I find the download, and think, Ill try and be nice, ill use the Torrent, well BitTorrent starts and reports it will take 4.5 hours, fair enough, I go out with my friends and call home at 10 to see how the download went, Im told its complete, so I help them shut the PC down (It had been attacked, and the firewalls were showing warnings)

I got home today, spent some time on the net, couldnt find any horror storys reffering to Ubuntu, so I burnt the ISO to the CD (Only needed 1) and just before I boot the older PC up, I switched to the 8.5GB hard disk, I dunno why I thought it would make any difference, It just did.

So I changed the BIOS to boot from CD, and then restart, a few seconds later, I have this absolutely beautiful screen, instructing me to just press enter, suddenly beauty becomes the beast, a horrible blue screen with white borders, and a very horrible interface, so I follow the instructions and get through screen after screen of nonsense, selecting options, it then does a red bar loading screen after loading screen, not telling me what the tools actually are (like SuSE does) so I get passed this, it screams at me for not having the DHCP working yet (Ill do that later), so it tells me to remove the CD and when done, it reboots the machine.

At this point I expect a nice beautiful screen to await me, instead no such a gift, I get Grub LOADING, and then it loads the kernel, then takes 1 hour to do the following, all just white text, scrolling down

A. List every single package
B. Move the packages to where they should be
C. Unpack it all
D. Setup
E. Configure

It took me about an hour, and whole way through it had "Critical Error, font config file cant be loaded" and just about the last thing it actually creates is the font config file.

So it then proceeds to boot Ubuntu, and it shows me a BEAUTIFUL login screen, one that makes XP jealous, I try to log in, for it to only moan I had casing wrong on my username, so I finally get in, the desktop loads within 10 seconds, amazing for a Pentium Celeron 333MHZ with 96MB RAM.

When it loads, it loads Gnome and its a very nice browny/dark orange.

It looks Terrific!

And the menus are so nice and beautiful, applications load fast enough for me. The system is a dream.

Ubuntu is a VERY nice system, it only has one draw back, the installer is the ugliest thing ive ever encountered. Puppy Linux is 50 MB and does a better job.

I hope by the time the next release is made, they have improved it.

Its such a spoil for such a nice graphically enchanced system.

As I stated in teh other Ubunut topic, the installer is horrible...the console-style stuff at the beginning (I dunno why they couldn't put the simple installer GUI there), combined with the adrenaline rush of finally getting to isntall it, caused the loss of all data from my Maclena's hard drive.

Sorry for not posting sooner, ive been very busy lately and only just managed the time to actually start playing around with my Ubuntu install, its running on a very old PC and yet still keeps a very nice speed, a little sluggish in some places, but a LOT faster than windows would run.

so I took some screenshots

http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/148/screenshot13ne.png
http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/8830/screenshot21ll.png
http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/1415/screenshot35sd.png
http://img105.imageshack.us/img105/3889/screenshot40um.png
http://img105.imageshack.us/img105/3685/screenshot59bf.png
http://img105.imageshack.us/img105/8999/screenshot62im.png
http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/9746/screenshot74kz.png
http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/8313/screenshot82qs.png
http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/1308/screenshot92ma.png
http://img294.imageshack.us/img294/8954/screenshot9st.png

Like?

the screenshots are like on the default ubuntu, i remember them, well if you want i suggest to change something or you can just use the default if you like it by the way, it only took me some time to install it, to choose some options and everything was fine except for the sound, later on i reinstalled in expert mode (took a little longer) and it worked, the sound i mean.

Yeah, Ubuntu's installer doesn't look nice, but at unless you're trying to set up a dual-boot system, it works fine. If you are doing dual-boot, you have to mess with all kinds of manual partitioning stuff.

Personally I love the Ubuntu installer. Sure it's ugly as sin... but that isn't really relevant. I mean, the whole point of it is to be simple, which it acheives perfectly. A handful of enter strokes and your install is flying. What you DO need to make choices about are all very simple things (language and timezone or whatever it is). The only thing you need to have any computer know-how to do is the partitioning but thats going to be similar in all linux distros and is again fairly simple. So yes its ugly, but its fast, efficient, and doesn't make you go through tonnes of choices that you may or may not know the answers to if you are a n00b.

But yea, I've been reading some things about ubuntu/linux is general the alst day or two and have been getting myself in a linux groove so I might reinstall ubuntu tonight. It's the distro I currently have installed alongside my xp partition but I ****ed around with it alot a month or so ago and kind of corrupted a bunch of stuff and just kinda mucked it up... so since I dont have much actual data on there I may as well start fresh. Plus I'm gonna need a distro set up soon anyways for once my university courses start back up for programming so I'll likely set all that up this weekend too. Mmmm, geek-out weekend