Took me a while to make this post as I wanted to really test through the features before writing a review on it, else it wouldn’t really be a review right? A little introduction on what is Ubuntu, Ok so we all heard about Linux right? Some may not really have an idea on what Linux is. Most people who aren’t too tech savvy would assume that Linux is the all black screen with just text, well sadly we have gone passed that era (though there are options to have that again). There is now graphical user interfaces, for example KDE, Gnome, Xfce, and many more. So Linux is an Open Source operating system which is FREE!.

There’s 2 ways to get Ubuntu Linux, you could either download it from here, or order a CD from here. Free delivery but may take a while. My CD came pretty fast though, considering it came from the UK and last I remember when I sent back a mail from the UK it took a good 3-4 weeks. Oh yea they would only send the desktop version and not the server version, I guess if you’re running a server you won’t have slow internet connection to download? maybe that’s the logic.

Here’s the picture of what came in the package, a sticker and 2 CD’s one for 32 bits and the other for 64bits processor.

Ubuntu from my point of view is really easy to use, there are 3 ways that I know how to install Ubuntu.

1) Installing Ubuntu without formating your hardisk and that means you get to run windows and Linux at the same time with no hassle of keeping a partition for Linux. You could do this by installing Wubi. I don’t think I need to give a guide on how to install as the screen shot in site gives a pretty clear picture on how to install it. Not to mention there’s only a few steps to install which takes like a few minutes if you do not count downloading it. Wubi would be installed as a folder on your selection partition of your hard disk and uninstalling it is just as easy as any other Window’s application.

2) The other way to have Linux (any distro) running on your PC along with Windows without having to reboot your PC is through VMware which is a virtual machine. I’ve not tried it yet…so no comment, check out the site or google for some guides.

3) Installing through the CD that you got or downloaded from the official Ubuntu site. The live CD is pretty useful and is real cool (at least that’s what I think). If you have installed Linux in the past I’m sure you have faced many problems like hardware not recognize or unable to boot and many other weird problems. I personally only tried a few version of Red Hat and although it worked on my older PC which ran on a Geforce 2 MX, I had more trouble installing it on a newer PC which ran on a new nforce chip motherboard and a Geforce FX5200 card. It seems that there’s quite some issue with fx series card not too sure why it’s not that supported. Anyways installing it through the live CD enables you to see if your hardware works fine with that distro and also you get to play around with it before installing it. Which is pretty much like Knoppix, good thing about live CD’s is that you could do backing up and restoring lost or corrupted files if your hard disk fail to boot or has some windows file that is corrupted.

The default desktop environment for Ubuntu is Gnome but you could always try Kubuntu which is a KDE base enviroment or Edubuntu, Gobuntu and etc. I would suggest either Kubuntu or Gnome for starters, as it’s alot easier and Kubuntu is pretty similar to Windows, whereas Gnome look a bit like a Mac.

Here’s how the desktop would look like with a Gnome environment.

So far, I would say the installation and running Ubuntu through Wubi is pretty smooth. There are some problems where my CPU resources would be sucked up a lot by Firefox not too sure why, but it was reduced when I patched the kernel and installed the adobe flash player manually. Was told that the Gnash flash player has a bit of problems so if possible uninstall it and install the one from adobe. I’m not too sure if the “Macromedia flash player” is updated in the Add/Remove Application as Macromedia don’t really exist now.

Most of my problems with Ubuntu are pretty much related to Firefox taking up my CPU resources, and also its wise to install your graphic card driver manually as the pre-detected driver wouldn’t be as good as the one you downloaded from the manufacturer’s site. I was also told that Nvdia card’s have supports Linux more, not too sure how true is it but I know I still have problems with my FX5200 on my desktop, and no problems on my ATI Radeon x700 on my notebook.

I crashed my OS once by installing too many programs and there the dedicated space that I made for Wubi was around 4/5GB not too sure. I would recommend you go higher if possible and if you would want to install more games/applications. I was trying to install KDE environment and didn’t have sufficient space, the installation stopped and somehow was a bug or error somewhere which didn’t allow me to remove the installed files. I thought rebooting the PC might help but when I tried to relogin it wouldn’t let me and would give some pop up on I logged in less then 10 seconds and something…so yea, the only option for me to login was console mode which I do not know how to remove what I installed.

What I then did was uninstall Wubi and it would give you an option to save your settings which has your caches files in Ubuntu and the default application (not the ones you install later). Restoring the saved settings is easy as well, just copy and paste over the new file. I’m liking Ubuntu so far and it’s A LOT easier then other distro that I’ve tried, but I’m still playing around with Fedora 8 which gave me a big headache and somehow still seem pretty unstable even after patching.

The other thing I notice about Ubuntu is that it takes up pretty much power on my notebook compared to Windows. I was running it on my notebook without a power point and my battery didn’t last as long as it used to. I found this article on the power consumption of Ubuntu which might be interesting to read if you are interested. There’s a comparison made with beta version of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) and the other older versions.

These power tests are just intended to be a brief look at Ubuntu’s average power consumption over the past six Ubuntu releases during the past two and a half years. It is also important to note that all of these tests were done from a single Intel Centrino laptop. Depending upon your hardware, the power performance may differ. While the power efficiency is improving in Linux, it is being outweighed by more and more processes running on the Linux desktop. These tests were done from a stock configuration. If you’re running Ubuntu 7.10 on a mobile device you can maximize your power efficiency through Intel’s PowerTOP, eliminating extra processes, and other performance tweaks. In a future Phoronix article we may look more in-depth at maximizing your mobile Linux power performance.

Source: Phoronix

More on Intel’s PowerTop

I also found a site which I kinda like, System76 sells computers which comes with Ubuntu ready, They got some information on why should you use Linux as well. Oh yea Ubuntu stickers can be obtain there…for FREE! again, lots of free stuff.

So summarize what I think about Ubuntu, I would say it’s a pretty good distro to start out if you are switching from Windows to Linux and so far I love it and will be using it, also will try to figure out how to solve my crashing problems on fedora. Try it I would say, you are afraid you don’t know how to partition and all that, install Wubi makes life so much easier. Oh yea…and for those who says, I do most stuff on Windows and Linux doesn’t support my programs, there is always a way to run windows base application including games on Linux and one way is through Wine. Linux has a Photoshop like application too called GIMP which some claim is almost as good as Photoshop, may not be all that powerful but the basic n advance features are there. There’s msn for Linux, dreamweaver like programs, blue fish or Quantra Plus and other many more free application. Good thing now that Gnome and KDE programs could work with each other compared to last time where some programs were environment dependent.