Very proud to announce I am now typing this in Firefox on Ubuntu Linux! Freshly installed today.

It took weeks and weeks for the CDs to arrive, but it was well worth the wait. The 'live' CD just wouldn't work on the Pentium 433 I wanted to use it on, so I took the plunge and dumped my old Windows 98 partition and installed it there. After half an hour or so of scrolling black and white text, it loaded perfectly. It even lets me dual-boot with XP which is on the same machine. The GUI is *really* smart. I had no idea.

I'm looking forward to exploring, but I have a pressing requirement. I need to import a website created on a Win box, set folder permissions and make a tarball. I'm gonna do some searching, but any help with that procedure would be welcomed.

Thanks again to everyone who gave me the benefit of their advice.

Peekay,

Ubuntu is a great distro. I'm using it on a P3 500mhz dell. Works great. I have just had problems with wep encryption using wireless. Of course this had to be a problem at my fav coffee house.

don (el paso)

Quote:
Stocked up with Cornflakes and had all my TAR commands ready this morning, but... no need. Gnome Archive Manager. Works like Winzip. I needed to install an FTP application too so I was prepared for some command-line stuff. The Ubuntu online help is excellent and provides 'cut-n-paste' command line code for newbies like me. But... no need. The 'Add/Remove programmes' utility downloaded and installed it in 2 minutes.

The folder management is excellent. I use a Macintosh and being able to colour folders has always been a useful way to identify things. Being able to change the folder icon... and add an 'emblem'... and add a 'note', is really cool. The whole thing is very slick.

The response seems a little slow on this 433 celeron but I only have 96 MB ram and it asks for 128 MB. The graphics card is nothing special either. I look forward to trying it on a faster machine.

@ Jharis. Did you buy your laptop with Ubuntu installed or is it straightworward to install on any laptop. I was worried about losing the trackpad or the 'sleep' function?

Peekay,

I mind wiped the poor beast and installed Warty(4.10) on a clean drive. Worked great until my 2nd update then had touch pad problems. I don't believe you will have any touchpad problems with the latest release (breezy badger 5.10). What I am running on my old dell latitude.

I have only had a couple headaches with WEP encription. I use a DLINK card and ubuntu has a network config utility that works pretty good.

Did you download the KDE or Gnome desktop version of ubuntu? I'm running the gnome version, but have to admit the kde desktop looks so much nicer.

Have you tried "dam small linux" yet? I hear it's only 50mb. I've got and old toshiba amd 333mhz 128mb I want to try it on.

don (el paso)

I appear to be on 'Hoary Hedghog 5.04' and 'Gnome 2.10.0'. I read about KDE as an alternative desktop but haven't seen it. Gnome seems very smart to me. There are some KDE items listed in the UBUNTU package manager. Does that mean I could install KDE myself and switch, or are they just for the KDE version of UBUNTU?.

I am interested because I wanted to try out the html editor Quanta Plus and I believe this requires KDE. However, another editor 'Bluefish' is listed as an installable package so I may try that for the meantime.

I am inspired by your comments to try a laptop next. Actually, I received CDs for Intel, AMD64 and PowerPC, so my old G3 Macintosh is a likely target too! OSX won't install on it (it's Unix kernel is so precious it 'panics' at the slightest hardware conflict) so maybe UBUNTU will give it a new lease of life.

You're going to like Breezy much better than 5.04! Breezy actually has a software installer that works much like windows does. So far I've only had a problem installing Real Player (couldn't find version 8 for linux). I'll fix that when I have a little more time.

To get KDE installed in Breezy you just have to search the official repositories for all the KDE stuff. I think you'll be looking for a KDE core package or something like that and a dozen other modules. Off hand I don't remember how many there are. Also I'm not sure how 5.04 handles this since I didn't stay on that version long.

Good luck on the laptop. If you like I can image you the latest Breezy ISO and drop it in the mail maybe by Tuesday. Let me know.

don (el paso)

Many thx for the offer of Breezy. I think I had better stick to this version for a bit until I get the hang of working with Linux. May take you up on your offer later though.

As an update, I am pleased to report that I successfully hooked up to the FTP server on my XP box so can now transfer sites across to the Linux machine. The transfer automatically sets the file and folder permissions so I just need to 777 those folders that need it and create a tarball. I've found that TAR.gz shrinks a 15 Mb site down to about 3 Mb. It decompresses in about 2 seconds on the server. Very pleased with that.

And... this post is being typed in Firefox on Ubuntu Linux running on my old Packard Bell EasyNote 3612C - circa 1999. I used Partition Magic to retain the Win 98 in case I lost monitor or keyboard, but it installed a treat. Touchpad, sound and monitor all work. Had to enter SSID and WEP details for wirelesss network manually, but otherwise it seems fine.

Gonna try out the web design software offerings next.