Are there any Ubuntu users out there?

Ian D J

Ian D J

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Ian D J
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Recently I've been given a couple of Pentium III PC's, so I took the innards out of both of them and used them to bring an old games PC back to life. So far, so good, just needed to get an OS up and running in it's hard drive, so I installed Windoze XP. But when it came to activating the thing, I found out that I've used up all my activation quota and I really couldn't be bothered to ring up Microsoft's call center to get a new code (besides, at that point it was quite late into the night).
So, that's when I've decided to dip my toes into the pool that is Linux's Ubuntu. I thought it might be cold and uninviting and won't want to stay in it for too long, but once I got into it I found myself gleefully playing about in that pool. I found it quite hard to get out of it as it's so nice and warm and bubbly.
The whole process, from cutting an installation CD to having the internet working on it was so quick, painless and easy. It probably took about an hour from clicking on the "Download Ubuntu" button to being able to view my webpage on the other PC running Ubuntu.
I've spent the last hour surfing the 'net on it, youtube, iPlayer, etc, everything seems to work on it. Bladdy marvellous. And it seems to be laden with more features than any of Window's OS (decent free paint program, a very respectable words processor, etc). I've already got it hooked up to my 32 " LCD telly and because I could set the screen resolution to match the same as the TV's (720 lines widescreen), it looks great where everything isn't squashed up.
It's only just now that I came back to my usual PC to type up this post and noticed how tired and boring Vista is looking. With that in mind, I'm finding it hard to get excited about the upcoming Windows 7. I won't be wanting to pay out the equivalence of a week's wages for that when there is a FREE alternative OS knocking about!
Are there any other Ubuntu users out there? And if so, any tips and advice on what else I could do with it? Also, are there any pitfalls?
 
I use CentOS as a dual boot on my laptop but its only for doing my NMR asignments and structure calculations.

pitdfalls is you can't use photoshop straight from linux lol
 
I have a fedora machine but don't use it much TBH. For all of windows bad bits it rules my mind :lol:
 
I'm a ubuntu user here, have been using it since ubuntu 5.04! :)
Only thing I miss is the fact that GIMP doesn't support 16bit image editing, apart from that I have all the image editing software I need:

Panoramic stitching: Hugin
Image Editing: Gimp
Raw image conversion: UFRaw, DCRaw, Rawtherapee or RawStudio

So far freeware software suits my needs, I'm not a pro photographer so I don't need to spend out for pro software.
 
Yup, I'm using UBUNTU 8.10 and I think it's a good way to go. The community that produces it seem keen and responsive to problems. It has a massive amount of drivers for old hardware (unlike Vista) so if you have old webcams, scanners, printers and the like, they will probably work with Ubuntu but not with Vista (ever).
I also have Gimp etc. loaded.
I also have another old machine running Debian but I like the feel of Ubuntu more.
I also run XP for networking but I may make the Unix machines into web servers if I get the time.
 
I used to use Debian occasionally (decision made mainly because of the package manager!) then switched over to Ubuntu as it seemed a little more modern and still has apt. However I've been using Vista since it came out and not really touched on linux on anything but a server.

I've been running Vista Business x64 on my laptop for the last year or so which is okay but find it slow at times. Considering I mainly use the thing for web browsing, I might take a look at the latest Ubuntu again. I seem to remember it was very fast!

Dave
 
POAH said:
I use CentOS as a dual boot on my laptop but its only for doing my NMR asignments and structure calculations.

pitdfalls is you can't use photoshop straight from linux lol
Click to expand...

I am pretty sure that you can get Photoshop 7 (and possibly CS2) running under Wine.
 
To answer the original post...
I have three systems running 3 different versions of Ubuntu.
An old E-machines 2.2GHz celeron running 'Gutsy Gibbon' (7.10). We use this as an email server, which we then access using IMAP, plus I have Apache, MySQL and PHP running on it. It's also a NAS, as I have a second HDD which we can access using either Windows or Linux machines by means of Samba. It also acts as a printer server, as it has a small Laser printer attached to it. Finally, I use it for on-line backup using Rsync.
This machine is in line for replacement later this year. I want to have a machine that has a Gigabit Ethernet interface plus SATA disk support so I can have some nice big disks in a RAID configuration. Then I can use it for NAS and as well a backup server (rsync).

My second Ubuntu machine is a new machine: a Shuttle XPC small form factor machine. This originally came with Suse version 10. I liked some aspects of the OS, but didn't get on with the package manager and for some reason, software updates just stopped working.
So I installed 'Hardy Heron' (8.04) on this machine, which is my main work station. The machine has a dual-core processor and 2Gb of RAM and runs very quickly. Again, it has MySQL, Apache and PHP on it and I use it for developing my own and a few other websites.

Finally, I have a HP mininote 2133 laptop (netbook). This originally came with SLED version 10. This was fine for a while and then after a particularly traumatic software "update", the WLAN stopped working.

It's also had 'Hardy Heron' on it. Whilst it was much better than SLED, I still had problems with getting a reliable WLAN connection, which relied on using NDISWRAPPER to get the thing to work.

A couple of weeks ago, I installed "Intrepid Ibex" (8.10), the latest incarnation of Ubuntu on the mininote. When I loaded the LiveCD, the WLAN came straight up, confirming rumours that the WLAN would be supported natively. It took about 45 minutes to install and everything appears to work. If you're interested, I posted an article about my mininote here

I've also tried Mandriva which I didn't like very much at all.

So I think Ubuntu is great. Hardy works well and will have long-term support (for at least another year). I am a huge fan of open-source software. There's very little that can't be done with it. I have tried and failed to get XP running in a virtual machine on the XPC - another way of potentially getting CS2 and maybe even lightroom working on this machine.

One thing I haven't tried yet is getting to grips with Gimp. The one reason I keep XP machines going is to run Lightroom (currently version 1.4) and Photoshop CS2. Plus, Kiasmum gets on well with Windows, Since it's not broke, I'm not going to fix it.

When the XP machines die (a laptop and the main desktop machine), they will probably get replaced with Macs (finances permitting).

If you want help with Ubuntu, The Ubuntu Forum is an excellent source of information.

So, we have quite a nice little network of machines...Geek heaven:)
 
I'm running Ubuntu on a quite old laptop, XP was crashing and BSODing a lot, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.
8.04 wasn't the best as the screen driver wasn't quite right but 8.10 is very cool, there are some effects I'd like on my iMac like wobbly windows and the cube.
The problems I get are hardware related really, it slows down as the laptop warms up. I don't like how much "they" have made it like windows although I can understand the reasons for doing it.
It's given my laptop a new lease of life though, I can web browse on the sofa or in bed knowing it's much more stable and for over 6 months hasn't crashed once. I don't see it as an alternative, it's plain better, I'll always actively avoid windows from now on.
Overall, I think Mac will always be king for me, the best but you pay for it. Ubuntu is close second, can't argue with a free OS being awesome value for money lol. Windows is dead, you pay for it and it's not as good as the free one.
 
Thanks for making this thread work, everyone. :) It's fair to say that I've very quickly warmed to Ubuntu. While I may no longer able to use the PC as a cheap 'n' cheerful games machine, Ubuntu is absolutely ideal to give that old PC a new leash of life and use it solely for surfing the web and that.
It was something I did on the spur of the moment yesterday and found the whole thing a pleasure as the installation went by smoothly and flawlessly.
I wonder if I could get my logitech 3000 webcam to work with it? It's a superb webcam I once used on my old XP machine, but it won't work on Vista!
 
Try the webcam - I'll bet it will probably work.
As for your games - try running them under wine, which is designed specifically for running Windows applications on a linux machine.

As for doing more with it, well the sky seems to be the limit. I strongly recommend the O'Rielly book called 'the linux cookbook'. As it name suggests, it contains recipes...but these ones enable you to do all sorts of things, ranging from repartitioninng hard drives, adding new hardware, creating web and mail servers, rsync servers, file and print sharing with Samba.

Cheers

Mark
 
I have tried wine and had no luck, apparently it's only for simple applications.
There is only 1 thing I want to run that's windows only, wine installs it but it doesn't run, if anybody has used wine for gaming let us know.
 
If you dont like the windows look and feel change it :D

There are loads of desktop managers out there to replace Gnome. Depends what you want it to do. If you want clean and simple i liked Enlightenment.

They are not really the kind of thing to be playing with when you start out with Linux, but if you have an old PC they are always worth playing with.
 
I've been dabbling since version 6.something - now my main PC has oodles of RAM, I run 8.10 in a Virtual Machine instead these days :)
 
Just going to grab it now to put on my laptop,
 
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