Archive for December 6th, 2008

Ubuntu was one of the first distributions I ever tried, and it is the one that encouraged me the most to stay with Linux. Ubuntu is one of the most beginner friendly distros out there. It comes with a lot of packages pre-installed to make your life easier and help you out as you transition your life to Linux.
Ubuntu is IMO the best option for a new Linuxer, it comes with several drivers already pre-installed as well as being the most bug free distribution I have ever seen. My first wi-fi usb card, a wusb54gc, worked right out of the box with Ubuntu 8.04; however, it did not work with 7.10, the reason being that it was only added to the kernel in the 8.04 version. It is a very strong OS and contrary to the hype, not just a distro for noobs.

Ubuntu has a very easy to use installer, including a easy to user graphical partitioner walks you through the setup process and makes it easy for you to configure your installation. If you are not quite ready to commit and want to try it out before partitioning your hard drive you can either run it from a Live CD or from the Wubi.

As I already said, ubuntu now has better hardware detection than before but it’s not yet perfect, it configured my network perfectly and was able to detect a good propietary driver for my video card. Installng propietary drivers under Ubuntu is easy but not perfect. For example, when I told it to automatically install my ATI radeon 2400 HD PRO’s driver, it downloaded a usable driver all right, the driver it downloaded allowed me to use 3D graphics with Compiz, but the mipmaps was broken. I had to go to the ATI website and download the Linux installer for the exact driver for this video card, which was easy enough to do and corrected all problems I had with my video card.
Ubuntu 8.04 introduced Wubi, which allows Windows and Ubuntu to be installed in the same partition, (sacrificing some performace, of course). You also get a boot menu when your computer starts, to choose into which session to log into. Wubi is uninstallable with the Add/Remove program.