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Linux/Ubuntu, school me please

Actually, I quite agree that at some point, digging into it is the best way to learn, but we all have our own point where we're ready to do that. Making sure you have all the information first isn't a bad idea. I'm doing the same thing myself, but on a spare computer, so I have the luxury to jump in with both feet and not worry about screwing the system up... ;)
 
wtburnette said:
Actually, I quite agree that at some point, digging into it is the best way to learn, but we all have our own point where we're ready to do that. Making sure you have all the information first isn't a bad idea. I'm doing the same thing myself, but on a spare computer, so I have the luxury to jump in with both feet and not worry about screwing the system up... ;)
Click to expand...

EXACTLY, they dont get it. I agree that you need to jump in at some point. But im not at the point of having it installed and up and running and messing around with settings. I am before that point, figuring out how to install it without messing up my computer. I dont have the luxury you have (a spare computer) at least not yet. So im being as careful as possible, double checking everything.
 
NathanP2007 said:
EXACTLY, they dont get it. I agree that you need to jump in at some point. But im not at the point of having it installed and up and running and messing around with settings. I am before that point, figuring out how to install it without messing up my computer. I dont have the luxury you have (a spare computer) at least not yet. So im being as careful as possible, double checking everything.
Click to expand...

On a spare computer here at work I installed ubuntu 10.4 really easily. I made a live USB with instructions on their page (or from googling it, can't honestly remember). Booted that up fine and got a feel for it a little. Then I used the installer on the desktop to dual boot an old system I had lying around here to test. Installed fine and it now dual boots like a charm. Just a suggestion... ;)
 
If i bought a small SSD (50-80 gigs) and put it in my PC, would that be a good dual boot option? install ubuntu 10.04 onto that?
 
I just scanned over the thread and I'm still stumped as to why the OP (who is active and just made the post above) hasn't just done a USB stick installation and... well, why is that such a tough thing?

Download Unetbootin.

Download the latest Ubuntu 10.04 ISO from this page:

http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs-Ubuntu/lucid/

Get the "PC (Intel x86) desktop CD" ISO.

Once both are downloaded, find a USB stick at least 1GB in size (everybody has at least one of these, right? Right?) and put it in a USB port someplace on the machine, quick format it with FAT32.

Run Unetbootin, select the Diskimage radio button (it's a round check circle, not really a check box), then click browse (the button with ... on it) and browse to find the Ubuntu 10.04 ISO), select it, click OK, then change the Drive: to the drive letter of the USB stick, click OK and wait for it to make the stick.

When done, don't reboot (choose the appropriate option) then when you're ready to actually ready to test this and use Ubuntu on that hardware without touching anything on the hard drive at all meaning you can't and won't do any damage to your hard drive and your current Windows installation, reboot the machine off that USB stick.

Voila, done. Running Ubuntu, quick and easy. If it takes you longer than 5 minutes to do this (after the files are downloaded) then something is very wrong and you're going to need more help than this or any other forum can possibly offer.

I keep seeing fairly knowledgeable people offering you very similar information all through the 3 pages of this thread so far (I use 40 posts per page) and, I don't see the OP actually putting any of it into action. It's just "Oh, right, that's nice, ok someone else tell me this again... ok, that's what the other guy said, you're dismissed, someone else repeat it to me yet again for the umpteenth time... oh, ok, that's new but, still the same old thing the other folks have said, next person please..."

Just do it.
 
Bahamut said:
I just scanned over the thread and I'm still stumped as to why the OP (who is active and just made the post above) hasn't just done a USB stick installation and... well, why is that such a tough thing?

Download Unetbootin.

Download the latest Ubuntu 10.04 ISO from this page:

http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs-Ubuntu/lucid/

Get the "PC (Intel x86) desktop CD" ISO.

Once both are downloaded, find a USB stick at least 1GB in size (everybody has at least one of these, right? Right?) and put it in a USB port someplace on the machine, quick format it with FAT32.

Run Unetbootin, select the Diskimage radio button (it's a round check circle, not really a check box), then click browse (the button with ... on it) and browse to find the Ubuntu 10.04 ISO), select it, click OK, then change the Drive: to the drive letter of the USB stick, click OK and wait for it to make the stick.

When done, don't reboot (choose the appropriate option) then when you're ready to actually ready to test this and use Ubuntu on that hardware without touching anything on the hard drive at all meaning you can't and won't do any damage to your hard drive and your current Windows installation, reboot the machine off that USB stick.

Voila, done. Running Ubuntu, quick and easy. If it takes you longer than 5 minutes to do this (after the files are downloaded) then something is very wrong and you're going to need more help than this or any other forum can possibly offer.

I keep seeing fairly knowledgeable people offering you very similar information all through the 3 pages of this thread so far (I use 40 posts per page) and, I don't see the OP actually putting any of it into action. It's just "Oh, right, that's nice, ok someone else tell me this again... ok, that's what the other guy said, you're dismissed, someone else repeat it to me yet again for the umpteenth time... oh, ok, that's new but, still the same old thing the other folks have said, next person please..."

Just do it.
Click to expand...

Yeah lots of people said to make a live usb thumb-drive, no one until you said how, and now that you have, i will do that. First i need to buy a thumb drive, i have been looking for some to buy , and looking at reviews but reviews on basically all thumb drives seem to be iffy. You have a brand recommendation?
(Btw if your first thought is "a usb drive is a usb drive who cares", i did used to think that way, but once i started reading reviews of "this usb drive sucks, its transfer rate is SO slow...etc" i started to be more cautious with just buying any usb stick.

Edit: Btw, i have a 64 bit CPU , and am running Windows 7 64 bit. Can i use the Ubuntu 64bit instead of the x86?
 
First:

A USB stick (for your intended purpose of trying out Ubuntu on a USB stick) is a USB stick. Simple.

There's no reason to outlay a wad of cash for something this simple - go to a local retailer and get the first 1GB USB stick you can find and I assure you it'll work just fine without issues.

Second:

Yes you can use the x64 version of Ubuntu if you feel daring but, I don't recommend it because if you have issues - which is a legitimate possibility here, keep that in mind, POSSIBILITY here - you'll get immediately snubbed towards Ubuntu and think "Well, it didn't work when I tried it so I won't mess with it ever again."

The sheer fact that you've gone this long with actively posting in your own thread about this shows you're serious about trying it, I got no beef with that. But what I do have a beef with is the insistence on continually asking more and more and more questions about things.

I said "Just do it" for a reason. You are only going to get that hand of yours held for so long, especially at a tech forum like this one. I can easily understand the reasoning behind the posts of others so far, believe me I have been teaching people how to use, work with, build, tear down, program, tune, optimize, and otherwise deal with computers since the mid-1970s so you're just another one in a list of hundreds if not many many thousands that I've edjumicated. :)

No worries.

The 64 bit version is not going to do anything of any consequence to you, for you, or with you in this situation.

Get the ISO I specified above (the 32 bit x86 ISO), get Unetbootin, get a 1GB USB stick, follow the steps I outlined above, and come back and tell us what it's like to have finally done something and what you think of "Linux" from the experience.
 
I didn't read the whole thread but I usually download the ubuntu iso and burn it to cdrom. I boot with the cd and it installs automatically. Yes, if your CPU is 64 bit (all cpus made in the last 5 years support 64 bit), use the 64 bit version. You will see all your memory if you have greater than 4 gigs. Speed would be about the same.

NathanP2007 said:
Edit: Btw, i have a 64 bit CPU , and am running Windows 7 64 bit. Can i use the Ubuntu 64bit instead of the x86?
Click to expand...
 
Well i have already downloaded and burned Ubuntu 10.04 64bit onto a CD and 32bit onto a CD, but im doing what you said word for word so i am downloading 32 from the site you said, have finished DL'ing unetbootin.

I am assuming i need to go into my bios and change my boot option to USB flash drive. So i'll do that once i finish downloading the ubuntu ISO
 
You can do all this from the CD, too, you know.

The USB option is recommended simply for one reason: it's faster, but not by leaps and bounds and everything in between. It's faster because USB sticks have faster random access times, as well as (for the most part) faster sequential read speeds even for random data. CD/DVD optical drives are notoriously slow when it comes to reading a lot of small files at random locations on a piece of optical media.

If you already have the 32 bit version of Ubuntu 10.04 burned on a CD that you created (or the 64 bit version one as well or inclusive), you don't need to go buy a USB stick.

In fact, because the ISO is already burned to a CD you're doing even better because with the USB stick you do have the potential of making some change to the OS files on that stick which could render it - meaning the Ubuntu OS on the stick - dead in the water. Even if Ubuntu is running from a USB stick it can and does still have the potential to write data back to the stick if done properly, aka root level process behavior, some errant command, that sort of thing.

With the CD you have no such issues - it mounts your Windows hard drive(s) as read-only by default, and the CD itself since it's already burned can't be changed in any way.

Save yourself the trip to the store:

Boot off the Ubuntu 10.04 32 bit CD and get busy with your Linux education.

That's about it.
 
Well i tried with a USB stick exactly how you said, and in the bios tried to get it to boot USB drive first, but it always booted into windows. I then put in the CD and had it boot to CD first and that worked. I did have a error message when Ubuntu was loading up , but it let me get to the desktop. So i was there on the ubuntu desktop, i enjoyed it. Definitely will start to use it and fiddle with things, find the best theme or w/e its called.
It was annoying trying to get my Wireless N usb adapter to work, and i never did, i Googled it and it was the fix was a complicated process, so i just plugged in my ethernet that was going into my xbox and that loaded up perfectly. I did the automatic Graphics card update. Thanks, any tips for anything are welcome...such as website(s) that have themes you can download and etc.
 
Well, your best bet is to focus strictly on learning how to get things done on Linux/Ubuntu and stop focusing on the GUI and how it looks. You need to realize that any changes you're making: updates, patches, drivers, anything you do when you boot off that LiveCD or USB stick disappear forever when you shut the computer down.

Yes there is a way to make some data persistent so it is called up after a reboot but it's not something that I will get into and it's more complicated so... (forget I even mentioned it, now) :D

Linux like all OSes require drivers to communicate with the hardware, and some hardware just isn't supported worth shit, there's nothing you can do about it. Almost 100% of the onboard NICs (the wired connection) ever made are natively supported; probably only 80% of the wireless NIC (the wireless connection) are supported, most notably a lot of the Broadcom wireless cards/chipsets, those are just nightmares and again, entirely too complex to get into at this point.

http://ubuntuforums.org is the best place for you right now, seriously - I'm not going to argue it or debate it, this is a tech forum and even with this subforum for Linux support, that is your destination and should be your "home away from your Windows home" from now on. The information you want is over there at that forum, seriously. Sign up and get to searching for answers or posting questions, etc.

Until you commit to a hard drive based installation - which is EASY to do with Wubi as stated earlier in this very thread by several people - you're going to lose all the settings and adjustments you make when you run Ubuntu off that CD.

So use the LiveCD for playing around - because by playing around you learn stuff, and you can't really bust anything since you can just reboot and wham, it's all fresh and new again, as many times as you want.

Wubi can be installed in a few minutes, it doesn't touch Windows at all (just adds a line to your boot loader, it does NOT install GRUB by default, another topic I won't get into), and it's a true hard drive based installation (from the perspective that your changes and alterations will "stick" between reboots.

Linux diehards will say it's not a true hard drive installation and technically they are correct - it's not an actual bare metal install on the native partitions - it's more than acceptable for this purpose.

Where you go from here is up to you... and don't call me Neo. :)
 
Bahamut said:
Well, your best bet is to focus strictly on learning how to get things done on Linux/Ubuntu and stop focusing on the GUI and how it looks. You need to realize that any changes you're making: updates, patches, drivers, anything you do when you boot off that LiveCD or USB stick disappear forever when you shut the computer down.

Yes there is a way to make some data persistent so it is called up after a reboot but it's not something that I will get into and it's more complicated so... (forget I even mentioned it, now) :D

Linux like all OSes require drivers to communicate with the hardware, and some hardware just isn't supported worth shit, there's nothing you can do about it. Almost 100% of the onboard NICs (the wired connection) ever made are natively supported; probably only 80% of the wireless NIC (the wireless connection) are supported, most notably a lot of the Broadcom wireless cards/chipsets, those are just nightmares and again, entirely too complex to get into at this point.

http://ubuntuforums.org is the best place for you right now, seriously - I'm not going to argue it or debate it, this is a tech forum and even with this subforum for Linux support, that is your destination and should be your "home away from your Windows home" from now on. The information you want is over there at that forum, seriously. Sign up and get to searching for answers or posting questions, etc.

Until you commit to a hard drive based installation - which is EASY to do with Wubi as stated earlier in this very thread by several people - you're going to lose all the settings and adjustments you make when you run Ubuntu off that CD.

So use the LiveCD for playing around - because by playing around you learn stuff, and you can't really bust anything since you can just reboot and wham, it's all fresh and new again, as many times as you want.

Wubi can be installed in a few minutes, it doesn't touch Windows at all (just adds a line to your boot loader, it does NOT install GRUB by default, another topic I won't get into), and it's a true hard drive based installation (from the perspective that your changes and alterations will "stick" between reboots.

Linux diehards will say it's not a true hard drive installation and technically they are correct - it's not an actual bare metal install on the native partitions - it's more than acceptable for this purpose.

Where you go from here is up to you... and don't call me Neo. :)
Click to expand...

Thank you, thats all really good information. I will be signing up on that forum now. Yeah i think i will be playing around as you mentioned with my Live-CD while i look for parts for my E5200 PC...once i get all those parts and put together the PC, i will install Ubuntu 10.04 natively on the computer.
One last question on this thread for you. If i build that new PC, install ubuntu 10.04 on it, and eventually get windows 7 and want to install it onto that computer as well, will i still be able to use wubi and install 7 on a separate hard drive (such as a SSD)
So basically, its ok to have windows 7, install wubi and inturn, Ubuntu,
But is it ok to have ubuntu installed, install wubi and inturn, Windows?
 
Best bet (my opinion here) is to install Windows 7 as the primary OS - that is what you're most familiar with assuming you've been using Windows for a few years or whatever. Obviously you're new to Linux/Ubuntu so I do not recommend it being installed as your primary OS.

If you do build a new machine, you can easily set up a dual boot (a real one with the real GRUB boot loader working with the Windows 7 one) but, Wubi will do just fine for you for a long long time to come, seriously. When you reboot the computer and you boot into Ubuntu, you ARE running Linux at that point, and there's nothing weird about it. The fact that Ubuntu is installed on a drive that normally has Windows on it doesn't matter at all.

Not sure why you're focusing so much on an SSD - I do realize they're faster but, they're not really cost effective just yet. A big fast hard drive is still the best way to get things done at this point.

That's my suggestion: stick with a big drive or two, use the money for something else, and continuing using Wubi until you have learned enough to be able to honestly say to yourself "Ok, time to install this the right way and leave Wubi behind."

That's a long ways off from where you are right this moment.
 
Bahamut said:
Best bet (my opinion here) is to install Windows 7 as the primary OS - that is what you're most familiar with assuming you've been using Windows for a few years or whatever. Obviously you're new to Linux/Ubuntu so I do not recommend it being installed as your primary OS.

If you do build a new machine, you can easily set up a dual boot (a real one with the real GRUB boot loader working with the Windows 7 one) but, Wubi will do just fine for you for a long long time to come, seriously. When you reboot the computer and you boot into Ubuntu, you ARE running Linux at that point, and there's nothing weird about it. The fact that Ubuntu is installed on a drive that normally has Windows on it doesn't matter at all.

Not sure why you're focusing so much on an SSD - I do realize they're faster but, they're not really cost effective just yet. A big fast hard drive is still the best way to get things done at this point.

That's my suggestion: stick with a big drive or two, use the money for something else, and continuing using Wubi until you have learned enough to be able to honestly say to yourself "Ok, time to install this the right way and leave Wubi behind."

That's a long ways off from where you are right this moment.
Click to expand...

Yeah that makes sense. I dont really have a big interest in SSD persay, its more the boot time and speed of it that interested me. But your right i will probably just get 2 HDD's. Yeah the only downside of getting windows 7 first is that means in building this computer i need to buy windows 7 again...instead of installing ubuntu for free and getting 7 down the line, BUT oh well. And what you said about use wubi and it will do me good for a long long time i totally get and will do. Thanks
 
Bahamut said:
You can do all this from the CD, too, you know.

The USB option is recommended simply for one reason: it's faster, but not by leaps and bounds and everything in between. It's faster because USB sticks have faster random access times, as well as (for the most part) faster sequential read speeds even for random data. CD/DVD optical drives are notoriously slow when it comes to reading a lot of small files at random locations on a piece of optical media.

If you already have the 32 bit version of Ubuntu 10.04 burned on a CD that you created (or the 64 bit version one as well or inclusive), you don't need to go buy a USB stick.

In fact, because the ISO is already burned to a CD you're doing even better because with the USB stick you do have the potential of making some change to the OS files on that stick which could render it - meaning the Ubuntu OS on the stick - dead in the water. Even if Ubuntu is running from a USB stick it can and does still have the potential to write data back to the stick if done properly, aka root level process behavior, some errant command, that sort of thing.

With the CD you have no such issues - it mounts your Windows hard drive(s) as read-only by default, and the CD itself since it's already burned can't be changed in any way.

Save yourself the trip to the store:

Boot off the Ubuntu 10.04 32 bit CD and get busy with your Linux education.

That's about it.
Click to expand...

I have been in Ubuntu with the Live CD a few times, and its been fun, and i am getting a second computer (parts that i dont have are cheap) and will make that a Win7/wubi Ubuntu system.
BUT i am still interested in why my USB Drive didnt work. I had downloaded that exact Ubuntu from the site, used that program recommended to put it onto the USB drive, i restarted the computer and went to my boot menu and changed the first boot to (USB-CD) (btw there were like 4 USB options, like USB-HDD and USB-CD etc) so i am not totally sure which i am supposed to use. Once that didnt work twice, i went into the bios and put it permanently to USB-CD first and it still booted into windows.
Only when in the bios i put it to boot CD first that it booted the live CD and loaded up Ubuntu.

BTW if you ask why does it matter , i got teh Live CD working, well 1. it didnt work so now im curious how to make it work, 2 the files will be more secure, iv read that with CD's with OS'es on them, they have to be pristine and burned at like x6 speed. And 3. its much more portable, i can boot any computer into ubuntu anywhere right off my keychain with a Live USB.
 
1) It's something to do with your mobo and the BIOS settings, and not Ubuntu or the USB stick. If you used Unetbootin and it told you the creation of the stick was successful, it was successful. It's now a matter of figuring out how to specifically get that machine to boot off that USB stick. A lot of mobos offer an option of pressing either F8, F9, F10, and sometimes F12 to force a boot menu to appear and list all the available bootable drives attached: it'll list the hard drive configured for boot in the BIOS, it'll list optical drives (even if they don't have discs in them), and it'll list USB media if they are attached.

Try those keys or look in your mobo manual and find the one that forces the boot menu to appear and give that a shot. I have yet to see a mobo made since 2003 that doesn't offer this option so, it's in there someplace, you just have to find it.

2) That's horseshit, plain and simple. You can crush a USB stick by sitting on it in your pocket just as easily as you can scratch or break a CD or DVD. Neither one offers anything truly superior over the other except a USB stick's incredibly low random access times and somewhat faster transfers. Either one will work just fine for your purposes. Some laptops on the market don't have optical drives (Netbooks and some others) so, the USB stick option is there for that reason + convenience. They're easier to move around and carry than an optical disc which needs to be covered/wrapped in some way to prevent scratches and obviously kept relatively flat to prevent shattering, etc.

3) I just said that at the end of 2) above. :)
 
Bahamut said:
1) It's something to do with your mobo and the BIOS settings, and not Ubuntu or the USB stick. If you used Unetbootin and it told you the creation of the stick was successful, it was successful. It's now a matter of figuring out how to specifically get that machine to boot off that USB stick. A lot of mobos offer an option of pressing either F8, F9, F10, and sometimes F12 to force a boot menu to appear and list all the available bootable drives attached: it'll list the hard drive configured for boot in the BIOS, it'll list optical drives (even if they don't have discs in them), and it'll list USB media if they are attached.

Try those keys or look in your mobo manual and find the one that forces the boot menu to appear and give that a shot. I have yet to see a mobo made since 2003 that doesn't offer this option so, it's in there someplace, you just have to find it.

2) That's horseshit, plain and simple. You can crush a USB stick by sitting on it in your pocket just as easily as you can scratch or break a CD or DVD. Neither one offers anything truly superior over the other except a USB stick's incredibly low random access times and somewhat faster transfers. Either one will work just fine for your purposes. Some laptops on the market don't have optical drives (Netbooks and some others) so, the USB stick option is there for that reason + convenience. They're easier to move around and carry than an optical disc which needs to be covered/wrapped in some way to prevent scratches and obviously kept relatively flat to prevent shattering, etc.

3) I just said that at the end of 2) above. :)
Click to expand...

Well i finally got it working (usb live stick). All those USB-____ options were useless, but when i would click on HD it would expand and id see the USB drive listed. So i found it, i had to do nothing while the Unetbootin auto loaded and them bam, Ubuntu off USB, very nice.
 
How do you do that Ubuntu CD quality check? Where it runs the CD checking to see if the information on it is damaged in any way?
 
as a person who new very little about linux until 6 months ago, i have found that Unetbootin was very helpful in setting up a linux distro, and you do not have to select the distro and down load it, just select it unetbootin will download it for you from its selection.

another similar option is called Pen Drive it is a large collection of linux distros that are personalized for use from usb drives, and it works great, i have several sd cards that i put several different distros of ubuntu, debian, mint, freebsd and other on and swap between them.
 
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