I’ve been planning to do an installation of Ubuntu and I got to it just this afternoon. So here are my reactions on the installation:
- Kinda confusing from the start, I was allowed to select from a lot of options on what to do when I boot up from the CD. But I think this is great for experienced linux users.
- I chose to select Run and Install, which I wasn’t able to understand what that meant until it actually ran Ubuntu on memory! Goddamn this is great! Window animations are really good, even better than Vista! It also has a desktop manager built-in with a very cool animation when switching between desktops.
- To do an install, I had to click an Install icon in the Ubuntu desktop. Really, it’s really great running an OS without actually installing it first. I was able to try out Ubuntu before deciding to install it in my harddrive. AND it’s got Firefox, OpenOffice, and Pidgin already installed in there! And other stuffs as well though I don’t know what they were ^_^x
- So, with Ubuntu actually running on memory, I can do an installation on the harddrive from the desktop. I can install while surfing the net for installation manuals. I was even chatting with my friends while installing.
- Now here comes another confusing part, I have NTFS drive partitions so I had to do a manual partitioning for the OS files. I had to set a partition for swap, root, and home. I didn’t know what they were but it was explained in the installation window. And the manuals were also available in the internet so I was ok. There were also format options (ext2, ext3, ntfs, etc.), most I don’t about, but I just chose the default (ext3).
- After that, everything’s done in the desktop. So I restarted, removed the CD, and it’s already working. Simple enough for well-informed computer users but not good for novice users. Well, most novice users don’t know how to install Windows XP anyway ^_^x
All in all it was quite easy to install Ubuntu. And I’m really liking it, I’ll try to use this for my PHP development.