Foo - Any Ubuntu users in the house?

My primary OS is Vista, but do have my laptop configured to dual boot into Ubuntu if I so choose. I just launched a few minutes ago, as I replaced the router and was too lazy to find the new password for the secure connection. Anyway, I noticed that my version is 11.10, and from viewing a bunch of videos on youtube about various Linux distros, I know that I'm now two full releases behind the times.

Should I bother updating to 12.10 or just concentrate on just updating the rest of the packages?

From watching those youtube vids, it appears that the UI has changed a fair bit, but still recognizable. I do like the looks of Mint as well (and zorin 5/6 and pinguyOS), but most of the tech heads tend to agree that ubuntu is perhaps the best flavor for the beginner.

I always like ubuntu but ive grown to like zorin more i thinks that is the right name now im on win 8

I always like ubuntu but ive grown to like zorin more i thinks that is the right name now im on win 8

Zorin 6 is out and there were a few who said that it is perhaps the best to get your toe wet with Linux if you are used to Win7.

Not sold on Win8 on a non touch screen- that is one of the reasons why I'm looking hard at diving into the Linux pool again.

I dnt like the gui of win 8 but the kernel or what ever you call it is pretty decent real stable and fast

Crickey! I just took a peek at what version I'm running of Firefox. It's 10.0.1. These updates are gonna take a while...:(

i use goggle chome for my browser

After installing Win 8 on my primary machine, the Windows 7 on my second PC seems primitive in comparision.

It takes a little getting used to but is so slick... if you are running Vista you can upgrade to Win 8 Pro really cheaply until January and the performance improvement on that side of things will be significant.

i use goggle chome for my browser
I currently have 4 browsers installed: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and IE9.

yep. 12.04 LTS here. no problems.

I started the upgrade process to ubunt 12.04 and it seemed to freeze up. Couldn't open up any other application, nor would it allow me to power down. I unplugged the laptop (battery was removed some time ago) and then attempted to ubuntu again with no luck.

Dude - Good to see a GNU Linux user out there - I got very tired of having to continually modify my Ubuntu installations and found that MINT Linux usually does a better job...

By the way - Mint 13 has more than a few problems lately but that could be to its use of the Ubuntu repositories...

(Always have your Puppy Linux disk ready for when you get in trouble...)

http://static4.fjcdn.com/comments/3696809+_31fa4c83d5cf69f8f8b9168a92d97f93.jpg

I just bought a new System76 Sable with 12.10 for my room mate.. It's a pretty nice machine and she's not much of a computer person so she's pretty excited to learn. Mainly she's just happy to have a new computer. For what she uses a computer for, I think it's perfect. I'm thinking I might install it on my iMac one of these days to play with. So far we are learning it together, and I'm thinking I might install Mint for her. Supposedly it's a little more friendly. Keep in mind her old computer ran Windows XP. What does everyone think about Cinnamon?

I'm downloading Quantal Quetzal now. Gonna install it on my new laptop. I plan on running VirtualBox with Ubuntu as my Host OS. The guest OS will be Windows 7.

Couch

I just bought a new System76 Sable with 12.10 for my room mate.. It's a pretty nice machine and she's not much of a computer person so she's pretty excited to learn. Mainly she's just happy to have a new computer. For what she uses a computer for, I think it's perfect. I'm thinking I might install it on my iMac one of these days to play with. So far we are learning it together, and I'm thinking I might install Mint for her. Supposedly it's a little more friendly. Keep in mind her old computer ran Windows XP. What does everyone think about Cinnamon?
Been checking out a bunch of the various distros on youtube. Here's my take so far:

1. There's a crap ton of different options out there.
2. Zorin OS probably comes closest to emulating a Windows "feel".
3. Pinguy OS is like ubuntu on steroids.
4. Pear OS is the one for those used to dealing with Macs.
5. You can have them as light or as feature packed as you want.

I'm really close to installing a new distro, and I'm leaning towards either Mint or Zorin.

I would go ahead and download it, burn it to a DVD and start it up as a LIVECD, you can check it out and see what you think about it. I carry the ISO file on a USB stick and have it set up to be bootable, it's got several Linux distributions on it as well as a custom Windows Pre-Installation Environment (PE) on it, it comes in handy. I also have it setup on my Windows box as a virtual PC using Virtualbox, it can be installed on Linux too so you could have a Linux guest on a Linux host to check out the new features.

I've always preferred the KDE desktop so I use Kubuntu.

I'm downloading Quantal Quetzal now. Gonna install it on my new laptop. I plan on running VirtualBox with Ubuntu as my Host OS. The guest OS will be Windows 7.

Couch

I installed that on my toaster last week

I run 12.04 LTS. 10.04 was unstable on my system for some reason probably related to video drivers. 12.04 has been rock solid, but it does take some getting used to. The old menus are gone and you have to search for your apps, which seems a bit nuts

I have one machine running Arch, one running Debian Testing and two running Linux Mint Debian Edition. In all four, I install XFCE for some of the apps, but use JWM instead for a desktop. Sure, it looks like NT4, but I don't care because it works and it's quick.

Should you stick with Ubuntu, go to 12.04 LTS, that way you will get updates almost forever. Also, the privacy people are all apoplectic about Canonical adding Amazon to the desktop search results in 12.10 if that sort of thing bothers you. It's only one package to remove, guys!

I really dig Linux Mint Debian because it's Debian-based so I can treat it like any other Debian machine, but the package selection is more desktop-appropriate and it saves me some setup work post-install.

I'm downloading Quantal Quetzal now. Gonna install it on my new laptop. I plan on running VirtualBox with Ubuntu as my Host OS. The guest OS will be Windows 7.

Couch

Posting with Quantal Quenzal now

Couch

Posting with Quantal Quenzal now

Couch
I'm posting from my toaster.

I'm posting from my toaster.
So what flavor of Linux do you have installed? Cinnamon toast or blueberry muffin? :p

I ran a Unix machine for a lot of years so I figure I've served my time and I don't need to run Linux to further punish myself.

We have a Linux server at work and I've gotten into it enough to change user accounts and so forth. I decided to do some experimenting so I pulled an old computer out of the office storage room and loaded a server version of Ubuntu onto it. I tried many times and could not get the machine to install an array of drives so I gave up.

My DVR is probably running some form of Linux which explains why I can sometimes push a button on my remote and it takes the thing 30 seconds to respond. I seem to remember that our old Unix minicomputer was really bad at multiprocessing sometimes. I think I could put together evidence that Linus Torvalds is a domestic terrorist.

Posting with Quantal Quenzal now

Couch
I'm currently in the process of installing Precise Pangolin now. Using Wubi through Windows to do it. I'll report from the other side of the partition after it's fully up.

My primary OS is Vista, but do have my laptop configured to dual boot into Ubuntu if I so choose. I just launched a few minutes ago, as I replaced the router and was too lazy to find the new password for the secure connection. Anyway, I noticed that my version is 11.10, and from viewing a bunch of videos on youtube about various Linux distros, I know that I'm now two full releases behind the times.

Should I bother updating to 12.10 or just concentrate on just updating the rest of the packages?

From watching those youtube vids, it appears that the UI has changed a fair bit, but still recognizable. I do like the looks of Mint as well (and zorin 5/6 and pinguyOS), but most of the tech heads tend to agree that ubuntu is perhaps the best flavor for the beginner.

Definitely keep up to date. My primary OS is Mac OS X, but I also run Ubuntu in a virtual machine. I run 12.04, LTS, Or "Long Term Support". I simply could not get used
to the Unity interface, but don't let that cloud your own judgement. Some folks seem to make out just fine with it. To get the Gnome desktop back, just open up a terminal CNTRL+ALT+T, and enter "sudo apt-get install gnome-panel" Yes to all questions. Once done, log out. You should now be able to choose "classic" from the login window.
That's it. Then you can customize the interface all you want, pretty much as before. Some things different in Gnome 3. For example, to customize the menu bars
press CNTRL+ALT and right click in the menu bar. Then, under properties, you can change colors, size, etc.

It is important to keep up to date, for security purposes, and to keep everything neat and tidy.

Linux is an awesome system, for people who like to learn stuff. Is Ubuntu the best distro? I like it, but it is arguable. Mint also looks pretty cool. Maybe one of the best things about the Linux community, is the way most people seem to want to help each other out.

Definitely keep up to date. My primary OS is Mac OS X, but I also run Ubuntu in a virtual machine. I run 12.04, LTS, Or "Long Term Support". I simply could not get used
to the Unity interface, but don't let that cloud your own judgement. Some folks seem to make out just fine with it. To get the Gnome desktop back, just open up a terminal CNTRL+ALT+T, and enter "sudo apt-get install gnome-panel" Yes to all questions. Once done, log out. You should now be able to choose "classic" from the login window.
That's it. Then you can customize the interface all you want, pretty much as before. Some things different in Gnome 3. For example, to customize the menu bars
press CNTRL+ALT and right click in the menu bar. Then, under properties, you can change colors, size, etc.

It is important to keep up to date, for security purposes, and to keep everything neat and tidy.

Linux is an awesome system, for people who like to learn stuff. Is Ubuntu the best distro? I like it, but it is arguable. Mint also looks pretty cool. Maybe one of the best things about the Linux community, is the way most people seem to want to help each other out.Welp, this is kinda embarrassing :o. I had Ubuntu 11.10 installed and decided to upgrade to 12.04 (or whatever it wanted to upgrade me to), but it looked to freeze up during the install process. I did a hard reboot and came back to Windows and proceeded to uninstall Ubuntu (and wubi). Then installed the updated wubi and downloaded Ubuntu 12.10...

After all of the files were extracted from the zip folder, I restarted the laptop. Instead of being given a choice between Windows and Ubuntu, it popped with some kind of error message- can't find directory, doc/path or something like that. The screen then populated with a bunch of 'flags', but I let it continue on. Finally, the Ubuntu wallpaper came up and it eventually brought up the entire desktop, but I was never given the opportunity to create an account, so every password that I tried would not allow a connection to the network.

I finally get the thing to reboot and was given the option to choose the OS and decided to go with Ubuntu again. But it failed to load. I got something that looked like a DOS command prompt, except it was GRUB. I tried what little bit of DOS commands I recall, and the only one it recognized was 'boot'... and I was informed I had to load the kernel first :(.

I'm going to give this one more shot before I call it quits. I still have an ISO that I burned to disc that has ubuntu 11.04 on it. I'm going to attempt to reinstall that version and then use the update center to upgrade from there.

I'm going to give this one more shot before I call it quits. I still have an ISO that I burned to disc that has ubuntu 11.04 on it. I'm going to attempt to reinstall that version and then use the update center to upgrade from there.

No1mad, may I suggest a clean install? I've always preferred to do it this way, as opposed to an "upgrade install". I just find it works better, overall.
This is, needless to say, a little more work, and you should backup your home directory before beginning. It is then a simple matter to
copy your data back to where it belongs.

Tip: The best, fastest place to get Ubuntu releases is from the MIT Media Lab Ubuntu servers. http://mirrors.mit.edu/ubuntu-releases/
You may also set it to get updates from their repositories, in the update manager.

No1mad, may I suggest a clean install? I've always preferred to do it this way, as opposed to an "upgrade install". I just find it works better, overall.
This is, needless to say, a little more work, and you should backup your home directory before beginning. It is then a simple matter to
copy your data back to where it belongs.

Tip: The best, fastest place to get Ubuntu releases is from the MIT Media Lab Ubuntu servers. http://mirrors.mit.edu/ubuntu-releases/
You may also set it to get updates from their repositories, in the update manager.

I'm limited to external storage media at the moment. I've got 700 mb CDs, a I gig USB thumbdrive with two pictures on it, and an 8 GB SD card that has a few pics and a couple of short videos. The distros that appeal to me from viewing youtube reviews are PearOS, ZorinOS, pinguyOS (which are all based on ubunutu 12.04 LTS, I believe) and Ubuntu itself. Only thing is, since they are all feature packed, they are all more than one GB in size.

I currently have 4 browsers installed: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and IE9.

Me too. I also have Sea Monkey. I use them all for different stuff. I have an old version of Ubuntu on an old PC for emergencies. It still works. I've heard good stuff about Zorin.

Me too. I also have Sea Monkey. I use them all for different stuff. I have an old version of Ubuntu on an old PC for emergencies. It still works. I've heard good stuff about Zorin.
I'm down to just three now- I gave Opera the boot (again). And I've given serious thought about showing Google Chrome the door as well, but I use it's Voice extension to send text messages to my wife.

And I was unable to install ubuntu 11.04 from the disk. I couldn't get past the partitioning.

Posting this using Linux Mint 10 on my laptop. Not the flavor I wanted, but it has potential. I'm going to do some digging around and see if I can find a way to upgrade this puppy. By the time I'm done, the only reason I see keeping Windows is to use IE to log into various government portals.

FYI- Firefox 11 sucks after getting used to the more minimal look of Firefox 16...

Edit: Blasted that distro and replaced with ubuntu 11.04 and promptly upgraded to 11.10. Still not happy. Going to have to make a run to somewhere and pick up some DVD-WR's so that I can get the most up to date- thinking Mint 13 Cinnamon or Zorin OS 6. And Firefox 16 looks like FF11.

Last chance to help me pick my next attempt at the Linux lifestyle. Mint 13 Cinnamon or Zorin OS 6? Both are glossed over versions of ubuntu 12.04 LTS from what I understand. Going to head for Radio Shack and/or Walgreens to get some DVD-Rs after the kids get home in an hour, so I've got like 2-3 hours to make up my mind.

I am still voting for Mint.

I am still voting for Mint.Gotcha.

I think that since I got a 10 pack of blank disks, I'm just going to download the ISO files of a few different ones, then run them in LiveCD mode as a trial and then install the one I like the best. Also need to figure out how to do the virtual machine thingy- might make things a bit more interesting.

I am still voting for Mint.


I'm also interested in Mint. What are your impressions thus far? It gets glowing reviews from just about everyone.

Still running 10.04 lts with both gnome and kde. Really wish there was a netflix solution for linux.

I'm also interested in Mint. What are your impressions thus far? It gets glowing reviews from just about everyone.

I use Mint Debian Edition and not the regular (Ubuntu-based) edition. And it is a really well-packaged distro based on Debian Testing with some of the Mint stuff from the main edition added to it. LMDE gives me the straightforward quality of Debian, but it's based on testing, so it's more modern, and the setup takes care of a bunch of desktop-related stuff for me right off the bat. (Disclaimer: I'm a Unix guy and have been using Linux since 1998, so any rough edges aren't rough to me at all.)

RE: virtual machine thingy: See also: http://virtualbox.org

And I was unable to install ubuntu 11.04 from the disk. I couldn't get past the partitioning.

I tried installing Ubuntu on 2 good computers, and from the first screen there were serious problems with both installations. I uninstalled them and went back to doing something useful.

It was worth a try. Most of what I do on a puter is just text and code, and just about any system should be able to handle that. It would be nice to put together a machine and not have to pay for the operating system.

I tried installing Ubuntu on 2 good computers, and from the first screen there were serious problems with both installations. I uninstalled them and went back to doing something useful.

It was worth a try. Most of what I do on a puter is just text and code, and just about any system should be able to handle that. It would be nice to put together a machine and not have to pay for the operating system.I managed to reinstall 11.04 using the disk- and I formatted and overwrote the LM 10 that I had managed to install via USB in the process. Then I upgraded to 11.10 last night and just finished upgrading again to 12.04 LTS. Not sure if I will continue up the tree to 12.10 yet or not, but I'm already seeing a difference between now and 11.04. I'm going to make a few LiveCD's of various distros to play with.

My primary OS is Vista, but do have my laptop configured to dual boot into Ubuntu if I so choose. I just launched a few minutes ago, as I replaced the router and was too lazy to find the new password for the secure connection. Anyway, I noticed that my version is 11.10, and from viewing a bunch of videos on youtube about various Linux distros, I know that I'm now two full releases behind the times.

Should I bother updating to 12.10 or just concentrate on just updating the rest of the packages?

From watching those youtube vids, it appears that the UI has changed a fair bit, but still recognizable. I do like the looks of Mint as well (and zorin 5/6 and pinguyOS), but most of the tech heads tend to agree that ubuntu is perhaps the best flavor for the beginner.

Update to the latest version

Update to the latest version
I updated to Precise Pangolin and then went back into Windows to burn an ISO of Mint13 Cinnamon. Ran Mint in LiveCD mode to try it out, then had to go back to Vista to let my kid play on the webz for a bit and got a crap ton of critical error messages. Logged back into ubuntu so she could do what she had to do. She's no fan and insisted on switching back.. time to break the restore disks. Restored back to factory settings (dummy me didn't think to make a more recent restore disk :o), so now I'm in the process of installing a boat load of updates and giving what bloatware I can safely remove the boot. I've attempted to install IE9 twice now, but my OS isn't up do date enough. Once I get all of my programs the way I like them, I'm making a freakin' restore disk.

On a side note- I'm gonna go with LM 13 over ubuntu after I get done wet nursing Vista. And I've noticed that Linux distros tend to shut down waay faster than Windows does.

I updated to Precise Pangolin and then went back into Windows to burn an ISO of Mint13 Cinnamon. Ran Mint in LiveCD mode to try it out, then had to go back to Vista to let my kid play on the webz for a bit and got a crap ton of critical error messages. Logged back into ubuntu so she could do what she had to do. She's no fan and insisted on switching back.. time to break the restore disks. Restored back to factory settings (dummy me didn't think to make a more recent restore disk :o), so now I'm in the process of installing a boat load of updates and giving what bloatware I can safely remove the boot. I've attempted to install IE9 twice now, but my OS isn't up do date enough. Once I get all of my programs the way I like them, I'm making a freakin' restore disk.

On a side note- I'm gonna go with LM 13 over ubuntu after I get done wet nursing Vista. And I've noticed that Linux distros tend to shut down waay faster than Windows does.

Mint 14 came out yesterday.

I updated to 12.04 because of a new netflix app and glory be it works.

I am actually installing LMDE on my work lappy right now. I went from Arch to Debian Testing to FreeBSD in a week. As much as I want to love FreeBSD, the wireless support isn't the best for a laptop. Almost there, though.

The problem with Ubuntu, Linux or whatever is that you guys are more interested in the operating system than actually using the computer as a tool.

That depends on what you need the tool for.

Mint 14 came out yesterday.Just saw a review of it on youtube by one of the talking heads that reviews Linux distros and Android apps/devices. I may go ahead and install that one, as apparently it fixes some of the known issues with LM13.

I tried to like ubuntu, but the auto hide function of the launcher/dock is rather glitchy.

The problem with Ubuntu, Linux or whatever is that you guys are more interested in the operating system than actually using the computer as a tool.My biggest issue at the moment is that my new MP3 player didn't play nice with Banshee, Rythymbox, and Clementine.

That depends on what you need the tool for.

If I want a machine for running photoshop I don't really want to mess with the OS when something doesn't work.