The road to Ubuntu begins. I am a Windows user and have been since windows 3.1. I've used them all -95, 98, NT, ME, and nothing but. Now however I'm feeling the tug. The word is spreading and the allure is too great. I must try this Ubuntu for myself.
My Inspiron 8600 laptop hardware is unchanged from the day I bought it, bar a memory upgrade to 1.25 GB. But my original 512MB would have sufficed. I also went for the top of the line graphics option at the time, which gives me a 1900x1200 resolution. That'll be interesting. Will Ubuntu detect it? I begin:
I downloaded the .iso image for Feisty Fawn from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download. From the local mirror it only took ten minutes or so. Then I burnt it to a single CD using ImgBurn - a free Windows program which burns iso images. Then I labelled the CD, put it in the tray and restarted. As soon as the DELL logo came up, I hit F12 and then chose to boot from the CD ROM drive. Ubuntu logo - I'm away. After a couple of minutes Ubuntu was running from the CD. I didn't tarry long here because I'd already decided to 'keep the thing'. But I did note it had found my resolution OK. I clicked the 'install' icon and then followed all the prompts. It was the usual OS installation stuff - time zones, keyboards layouts, user names etc. The only part worth mentioning here is the disk partition. Most users should simply elect for Ubuntu to do this unguided. Relax - your Windows partition will be resized unscathed and a new partition of sensible size will be created for Ubuntu. I chose to do a manual partition because I wanted to keep it small for apps only. My intention was to store all my music, images and documents on an existing NTFS partition which would be shared with Windows (more on that later). I ended up with a 7GB partition for root (/) and a 2GB (twice your physical memory - is that still the rule?) for swap. I got a little anxious about removing the CD at the end of the install process, but I didn't need to because it ejected the disk automatically when it was ready. I hit enter and the laptop rebooted.
The GRUB boot loader looked a little 'terminal window' and confusing, but I simply waited for Ubuntu to load automatically and it did. I logged in and was soon presented with the caramel 'human' face of Ubuntu. I like it. The computing world has enough blues.
First thing I wanted to do was set up my wireless connection to our home's router. I saw a network connection icon in the top right system tray and clicked it. Bonzer - it had found mine and my neighbour's wireless networks. I selected mine and in the ensuing dialogue box entered my WEP key. There was some confusion here - was my key 'passphrase' or '40/104-bit hex'? Trial and error taught me it was the latter in my case. I was in! A tooltip notification told me I was connected. Yay. Now for the lesson I then learned - don't cancel the request by the 'key-ring' prompt to record a password to use with you wireless connection. I know. It seemed strange to me too. I've just entered my connection's WEP key. Why does Ubuntu want another password? But enter one - anything, even 'boo' will do, because if you don't, you'll have to find your WEP key and enter it again next time you log on. That's what I found out.
And then I tweaked Firefox - small icons, no bookmarks toolbar, add tab icon. And I read some news online. My first day with Ubuntu was done.
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