Mick's World

OMG this OS is so 1337!!!!!1

Ok cut the crap. That’s what i found Ubuntu to do. Here’s how it did just that.

But first a brief history. When i started using Linux years ago i started with a copy of Redhat. After become obsolete, a natural progression from Redhat, was to move to Fedora for Linux needs. I tried a few other flavours, but at the time wasn’t as satisfied as i was with Fedora.

After using Fedora for a while and in the end not being 100% content with how i was able to set it up for my situation i recently start reading about Ubuntu. Obviously there has been a lot of hype about Ubuntu and i thought, why not give it a try.

I took the plunge and installed the server edition. Now the server edition is different from the desktop edition for a number of reasons, but a primary reason is that it doesn’t have a graphical desktop. Since i was installing this for use as a development server i wanted the features provided by the server edition.

Once i had it installed it was a matter of customising it to my liking.

First thing i did was to get the beautiful desktop that Ubuntu provides. To do this i simply typed sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop. It was that easy, after a reboot i was on the Gnome desktop. That was also when i discovered how great apt-get is. Coming from yum on Fedora, apt-get was a breath of fresh air.

After that i wanted to do more this fresh install and also set it up like the beast of the dev server that i wanted it to be. To do this i followed this fantastic tutorial - The Perfect Setup - Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Server (Dapper Drake).

This allowed me to setup a server with the lot basically. It included LAMP, Email, DNS and more.

While looking around for information on Ubuntu prior to downloading it i came across an article - Hack Attack: Top 10 Ubuntu apps and tweaks. Which provides some excellent information on a few tweaks and extras that are available for Ubuntu that enhance it just that bit more.

From this list of tweaks my favourites were, Automatix, Add NTFS Read/Write support and Frozen Bubble! I consider these as must haves in particular the NTFS support as i had a hard drive with a lot of backup data that was NTFS. Also Frozen Bubble is very addictive.
After installing and customising this new flavour of Linux i was happy to play around with all the new features i’d just added. This didn’t last long as after a couple of days i wanted to customise more and with the ease of use that apt-get provided i was off sculpting away at my Linux box.

In the next edition of this series i’ll describe in more detail about further customisation i made to the system. In the mean time i suggest you follow the links in this post, download a copy of Ubuntu and try it out for yourself, if you’re not doing so already.

Continue to Part 2 »