The Road To UBUNTU
Jul 21st, 2007 by Don Ray
As many of you know, I have made the migration from Microsoft Windows XP to the UBUNTU version of Linux. While I was catching up on a little reading on some of technology sites I frequent, I came upon this article in Tom’s Hardware entitled “Leaving Windows Behind“.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with Linux and are getting tired of the continual expense of putting up with Windows upgrades and all of the associated products of keeping it secure, you might find it an interesting read.
While I was at my daughter’s house, I installed UBUNTU on the two PCs that were being used by my grand-kids. They were complaining about how slow their PCs were. Upon looking at both PCs they were burdened with several viruses and spy-ware. Since they strictly used these PCs to access the Internet and write reports for school UBUNTU was a reasonable candidate to replace the infected Windows XP systems that were on both PCs.
The first problem I had to overcome was to replace the DVD burner that was on the first candidate PC. It was no longer operational. After purchasing a replacement DVD burner, I removed the failing drive and installed the new drive. On further inspection, I found a full length wooden pencil had been forced into the old DVD burner. I think this was an example of Olivia (aka - the small blond tornado) trying to fix the problem.
With high-speed Internet, it took only about 10 minutes to download and burn the UBUNTU CD. If I had been thinking quicker, I would have installed the EDUBUNTU version which is oriented toward younger users. About ten minutes later, the first PC (the oldest and slowest) was up and running Linux.
I waited a couple of days to see if there was any negative reaction from my grand-kids. Instead of a negative reaction, they all wanted to only use the Linux PC since it was now running faster than a scalded ape. With this positive reaction, I installed UBUNTU on the second PC. UBUNTU found all hardware including a networked printer and networked hard-drive.
I guess this has been the first post that has a relationship to “How I spent my summer vacation”. It seems what ever I do, I always get involved with some sort of technology.
Welcome home, Don Ray. Nice to hear about your success back in God’s country with Ubuntu.
The best thing to do with that external drive is to format it to FAT 32, then you can use it on just about system. One of the easiest ways to do it is to install the hard drive temporarily in a computer and boot the computer with a Win 98 boot disk and format it. It’s generally a PITA to format a drive as FAT 32 in Linux, but can be done. There are some distros that can handle NTFS. I use Feather Linux for troubleshooting Windows systems that have stopped working, and have no trouble reading and copying from NTFS volumes. Pretty sure I can write to them as well, but my memory being what it is, I won’t swear to it and don’t have time to test.
I just finished rebuilding a Winbox that got eaten by a browser vulnerability. It just flat refused to connect to the network, the AV software wouldn’t load and I couldn’t delete the TCP/IP driver. Virus scans showed it clean. Once more, stay far away from Internet Explorer.
Henry
Hi Henry. I am not going to do anything until I get the Mac Mini up and running and see how if it reformats the drive. Since it is an external USB drive and I don’t have any of my old copies of Windows 98, I will move forward with caution.
No problem. If you open the box, inside you will find a standard IDE hard drive. I put mine together by buying the enclosure and putting a drive in it. If you’d like a Win 98 boot floppy, send me an email with your mailing address and I’ll send you one.
Henry
Thanks Henry. I will keep that in mind. I am still reading more UBUNTU forums to see how others have done it. I also want to see what the Apple Mini does when it is connected. I don’t think it uses NTFS either and it might formate it easily.
Hello:
Nice that you use Ubuntu and we are very happy if you join our Ubuntu Panama Team.
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Thanks Mario. I will look into doing that.