It is GOD of Operating System (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS)

Member Name: kamal

Product:	Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
Date:	17/09/08 (297 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free, Very secure and reliable, Fun, Flexibility, Very fast, Rich, Community feeling

Disadvantages: None.

When I used Microsoft Vista, I was highly disappointed by the trend of MS towards removing flexibility and fun from the Operating system in favour of flashy look and feel. It was too heavy and even with 1 GB RAM, I was struggling to run a single program.

So I decided to move away from Microsoft and installed Ubuntu on my laptop to experiment with it. I installed it on the external hard drive, so I will not break anything on my Windows XP laptop.

For those new to linux, Ubuntu is a collection of applications, drivers and desktop environment which works on top of core linux operating system. There are several types of linux cores, and Ubuntu is based on "Debian" core, which is the most popular one.

Installing on external HDD was bit trickey, but you can find lot of help on the internet to fix the things. Especially following tips were very very useful at the final stage of installation :
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/
a-much-easier-way-to-install-ubuntu-on-a-usb-devi ce-stick-or-hd.html

I used SUSE briefly in the past, so I am not new to linux world. When I started Ubuntu (8.04 LTS that is), it was whole new fresh world opened for me. I played around with it, spend lot of time exploring, intalling new softwares and comparing its pros and cons with Windows XP.

Here is what I have found:

INSTALLATION
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If you just want to see how things look with Ubuntu, You can download ISO from ubuntu website http://www.ubuntu.com/ and create LiveCD. Then restart your computer with LiveCD in the CD drive and make sure that CD drive is higher up in the boot sequence than internal hard drive. It will take some time to load ubuntu as it is accessing from the CD. But after it is loaded, you have fully functional Ubuntu Operating system on your laptop.
If you want to do a full install on your PC, then you can click on "install" option from the desktop.

The standard install is very straight forward. Go through pre-install documents on ubuntu website before starting if you are not technical person.

I installed on the external HDD, which was tricky but worked finally after couple of attempts.

FIRST IMPRESSION :
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When you start, you get progress bar with ubuntu logo. Once loaded you get very nice and simple clean GNOME desktop, with all the menus on the top. You can change the menu position easily.

MENUS :
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You get 3 main menus :
- Applications
- Places
- Systems

By clicking on one of these, you can navigate to submenus, where all the options are neatly arranged for you. It is very easy to reorganise and add/delete items from the menus, and create new menus and panels.

I found that my laptop works lot faster than it does using windows XP.

Programs:
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There are lot of programs are preinstalled with standard ubuntu installtions. You can add/delete programs using ubuntu repository, which is safest way to manage softwares on your PC and stay away from the risk. You can also easily install other programs freely available on the internet.
You can find similar or better alternatives for whatever is available for Windows XP and Vista (Apart from useless iTunes software, which puts of many stupid iPod users from using linux).

Let's compare commonly used stuff on XP and discuss its alternative on Ubuntu :

Microsoft Office : OpenOffice is free option, which works fine with all microsoft file formats. It can also create PDF from the document in a single click. Why pay MS £99 then ?

Internet Explorer : Firefox :-) I know lot of people using firefox even on XP. so why do we need non-standard mamoth called internet explorer ?

Yahoo/MSN messenger : Pidgin Messenger OR Gaim are alternatives, with Pidgin already included in the installtion. They can bring all your Yahoo, MSN, AOL, ICQ friends on the same window. Long before Yahoo and MSN decided to combine their contact.

Skype : Guess what ? Skype has linux version which works lot better than skype for windows.

Webcams : I need to install drivers on windows in order to get webcam working. But on Ubuntu, I have used 3 webcams so far without doing anything. Just plug and play. Isn't it amazing ? fyi, I used vm-micro, creative and logitech webcams.

Multimedia : There are lot of free applications for audio and video on ubuntu. I liked Rhythmbox as audio player and music manager. VLC is exceptional video player, which I would even use on windows. There are few iPod compatible programs to let you manager music on your iPods.

Accessing Windows XP files : Ubuntu will read everything on NTFS filesystem, that means you can access everything stored on windows XP hard drive. So you don't need to worry about incompatibility issue.

Drivers : Most of the hardware drivers are in ubuntu repository, so will work out of the box. If not then just google it and you are sorted in 5-10 minutes.

3D Games : works lot lot beter than on XP. I used free 3D first person shooter game Open Arena, which is amazing.. There is a huge repository of games and utilities for ubuntu. I also installed 3D flight simulator, which is great.

Wireless : Wi-fi on my laptop worked straight away with ubuntu.

Programming : For programmers, everything is there. All major database system supports linux. Most of the big organisations use linux to run Oracle and Sybase. Java, NetBeans IDE is also there. There are lot of free development tools available. For hardcore VB fans, there is Gambas2, which is similar to VB. Apart from that C++, Perl, Python, PHP, Apache webserver are preinstalled. In short, Linux (Ubuntu) has greater programming capability than XP.

AntiVirus : You generally don't need one. But there are few freely available AVs for liunx.

RELIABILITY
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Linux in general is very stable and less prone to crash and virus. There are very few (next to none) viruses for linux. The shell is very very usefull for command line interface and scripting. Programs work faster than XP and seamless. Linux does not have registry, everything is stored in a file. So there are no ghost entries to make your registery heavy and computer slower.

SUMMARY
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List is very long.. and don't think Windows or Mac can win in this scenario. Ubuntu now need bit of advertising and need to educate normal users who were scared away by earlier versions of linux distributions.

Summary: Humanity toward mankind, and lot of joy and fun given to mankind.

Variety of features:
Reliability:
User friendly: