Well I did it~! I am transitioning over to Ubuntu. Quite stubborn NOT to upgrade to Vista and tired of XP, I decided it was time to dip my toes beyond my comfort zone. Now the last time I touched anything remotely related to Linux it was back in high school and I was pinging servers for a grade.
This past week the CD for Gutsy Gibbon came in and I twisted my hands in anticipation. My plan was to dual boot since I wanted to keep my XP OS for my Adobe CS Suite and a couple video games I'm still working on. After reading tutorials and watching screen casts on how to partition my HD for a couple days I was comfortable enough to finally take the plunge.
I've seen HD partitioning before but have never done it myself. There were some moments where I had to make some educated guesses and common sense decisions but I came out pretty alright. (To clarify the CD edition of Gutsy that I got didn't offer the Partitioning wizard that the later releases are said to offer so I had to do this manually.) With the partitioning done I set about to install; which surprisingly went quite well. Conditioned as I am to the Windows installation set up and the hour long updates that follow; I was good to go with Ubuntu 15-30 min after I had finished partitioning the HD. Joy!
That is until I realized in my excitement I had completely forgotten to write down my login and password...
"Fuck..."
A couple "switch backs" between XP and the 'Safe Mode' for Ubuntu I was finally able to reset my login and access the system.
The first thing I did after updating was set up Pigeon and Firefox.
At one point in the middle of all that I was asked to enable my video card. (For the record I'm working with a fairly new Dell desktop; which has a video card not completely 'compatible' with Ubuntu... I found this out later.) Eagerly I click the 'Ok' button...
"Fuck..."
What followed was much rueful laughter and light hearted grumbling; as well as "switching back" to XP time to time since I couldn't even make out a legible Ubuntu login screen. Thank you to all the people that have gone before and typed out the may trouble shooting blogs and guides I surfed through to solve my problem. Safe to say my screen doesn't look squished or like a digital paint smear anymore. I unfortunately can't get Compiz to work properly yet; but I'm not going to touch that in detail just yet. I have to say though the Screenlets are cute.
From there I began to fall in love with Synaptic; set up my Thunderbird, configured Firestarter, and got the codecs I needed. I'm still trying to find a nice media player that I would be comfortable with, preferably one with a similar feel to Winamp. The default one provided is alright but the layout to me is rather... Bleh...
To my pleasant surprised my NTSF partition was automatically mounted; saving me the trouble of having to do that manually later. This made transferring files much easier much to my delight since by this time I was to lazy to load on my back up CDs.
So now I'm beginning to poke and prode around; exploring how to fine tune my dual-boot Ubuntu machine.
And there you have it... Next up is installing Ubuntu on a laptop and formating the whole HD this time. No doubt there are still some blunders and surprises in store for me. But I can definitely see this being a nice long commitment.
Till next time...
[Fangirl moment]: Got Avatar: The Last Airbender Book 3 Volume 1 today... SCORE!
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