Sep 20, 2009
My first day on Ubuntu – Installing Ubuntu
It feels so good typing this post in Ubuntu. Finally, I made it. After postponing installing Ubuntu for complete one year due to HDD free-space constraints, I finally dragged my lazy head and burned half a dozen dvds to get free space of 20 GB. I thought it was more than enough, so didn’t burn any more.
Then, I googled if Ubuntu could be installed on NTFS and was disappointed to see that although it could be installed, it was highly unrecommended. So I needed to make unallocated space on my HDD so that Ubuntu could automatically make Ext3 partition on that unallocated space.
Jargon:
Unallocated Space: The space on HDD which has no filesystem applied to it.
To do this, I ran Powerquest Partition Magic 8. The resizing of partition required reboot and so, I did. An error occured so I was in trouble now. I searched for a free partition manager tool on google and most of the results pointed to easeus partition manager. Without thinking twice, I downloaded the setup and installed it. It required a reboot too for resizing the partition. I was doubtful that this would work. I rebooted and it did work. It took around 30-40 minutes to resize the partition. Although, it was slow, it did work. I now had to just install Ubuntu. I inserted the CD and proceeded with the install. When it told to choose the partition, I chose ‘Use the largest continuous free space’. It took around 15 minutes for installation to complete. I rebooted into xp just to see if the xp still worked (I was paranoid, lol). It did work. So I booted into ubuntu and started exploring it. Although this wasn’t the first time I was using Ubuntu, it certainly was the first time I used installed Ubuntu on my laptop.
It looked good and fast. The first thing I did was check if my wlan worked, since linux have a tendency to not work with wlans, webcams, bluetooths etc. But to my amazement, all these things worked. I connected to my AP and fired up the Firefox from the top bar.
Browsing was as fast with firefox. I now had to go to windows xp to backup my Firefox profile using FEBE and restore it in ubuntu using the same plugin but I didn’t want to go back to XP 
. I decided to do it later.
I logged into msn im, using Pidgin which was in the Applications->Internet by default. The Application menu looked scarcely populated which was unusual. There should’ve been lots of applications there. So I thought they must be hidden. I right-clicked on ‘Applications’ and clicked on edit menus. I checked all the applications in all the menus. The menu looked more complete now. I love this feature on Ubuntu/Linux where applications automatically are categorised into appropriate categories in Applications menu unline windows where the Menu gets extremely cluttered after few months. I hope this doesn’t happen with Ubuntu.
I tried my hands on installing new applications. I tried to install virtualbox. I downloaded the appropriate package from its site and double clicked the installation file.
I then tried my hand at installing few apps. I did install Sun’s virtualbox, Gyachi (yahoo messenger alternative), amsn (msn messenger alternative).
I will keep exploring for today.
For people who are new to Linux: Read this
Its an awesome article (I read it as recommended by Shantanu Tushar).
Cheers!
