GO LINUX!! The steps to rid yourself of Microcrap and Crapple!!!

This is the deal. There seems to be a bit of confusion on linux. I wanted to try to demystify and enlighten.

I’m at work, so this will be kinda brief. But let me tell you, there are many reasons linux is the best. At the same time, I am going to try to give you some basic info on how to install and provide some input on how you can take advantage of a install. Hopefully with this info you can part ways (for the most part) from Microshit or Crapple.

To give some basic background: Basically there are three major releases, debian, redhat/fedora, and slackware (there are more, but these are the big ones). There are literally 100’s of distro’s (distributions). Here is a graphic that illustrates the field [link to futurist.se]

Some facts:
• Linux is open source, which means everyone has access to the code. For low level / new users, that means that 99% of these distros and the associated software packages are free.
• When you initially download and create a install disk (I’ll get into this later). You can actually run linux, and test it out, before you even install it on to a drive (that’s how efficient these OS are). If nothing else, if your OS crashes, a linux disk is a recovery disk while being a network enabled, fully functional OS!
• It also means they are wonderfully stable and secure. It stays out of the way, it does what you tell it to do and ONLY what you tell it to do. When an issue has occurred, you have the entire linux community fixing the problem.
• Debian has 20,000 software packages. Fedora has around 15000; security, games, system tools, internet tools, etc. Software packages like MS Office, photoshop, adobe, have clones. (The one down side, the software won’t be as shiney, or may have all the options as the MS versions, but I find it makes little difference to me.)
• Most MS files can be opened, edited and saved with Linux software.
• You can dual boot a hard drive. This means you absolutely need to keep/use a specific Windows application, can install linux on a different section of your hard drive.
• With a dual booted system, you will be able to select which OS you want to load when you start your computer.
• With linux you will be able to access files from your entire hard drive.

These are my favorite linux distros:
www.ubuntu.com
www.linuxmint.com

Light weight installs
lubuntu.net
[link to xubuntu.org]
[link to www.archlinux.org (secure)]

Basically a free ‘enterprise’ version of linux. Kind of heady for new users.
[link to getfedora.org (secure)]


One of the reasons to go with one of the larger linux distro’s is that you’ll have a bigger community of support. And I should say, support is a breeze. Any questions, not matter the complexity, you’ll have tons of awesome people that will work you through the details.

Okay, now how to install:
• Go to the page and download the latest release. You’ll have multiple options here, you can either download the latest release, or dowloand the LTS (long term support) release. Either way, you’ll still get OS, software, and security updates. But in terms of rock solid stability, the LTS release is probably the best way to go.
• Once downloaded, burn the file to disk. (you’ll need to burn it as a ‘image file’)
• Place a blank unformatted CD or DVD into your CD/DVD drive.
• Right click on the linux file you just downloaded (the file extension will be .iso) and select “Burn disk image”.
• Once your done, you have a fully functioning linux OS!

Now you can run it while you are still in windows. You can even install it while operating windows. Although installing it after changing the BIOS mode is less likely to cause problems (as below).

If you have an older system, this may be slow. You may want to shut down the computer and boot from the CD.
To accomplish this, once your computer first boots up, you’ll have an option to go into bios settings. Usually you hit either the F8 or F12. In there you’ll have an option on how your computer boots. It’s very easy…either google boot from CD, or go here for a synopsis: [link to lifehacker.com]

Install process is super simple, and will walk you right through. The only thing that may slow the install is creating a partition to install a dual booted system. This is also very easy.

Steps

Click on unallocated space, click on new. Enter size as 48GB (or whatever size you want, you’ll just have to enter in mb), choose file system type as ext4, mount point /, partition type primary. This means ubuntu root partition, where all system files will be installed.

Click on unallocated space, click on new. Enter size as 2GB, choose primary partition, file system type SWAP. SWAP is like virtual memory…if HD storage and RAM is at a minimum, you really don’t need it, but it will help speed up your system.

A note on SWAP: Its generally calculated 1.5x RAM SIZE. If you have a 2GB RAM, preserve 1 GB for SWAP, have 4 GB RAM , preserve 512MB. Its your choice. Good amount of SWAP improves performance. I think Ubuntu requires SWAP, but other distro’s don’t.

Otherwise you have to create only two partitions:

First one (ext2, ext3 or ext4) which is called '/'. Its the root partition for all the Linux Operating System.

Second one (linux-swap) with about 4 GBytes, its a disk space for Linux that where users never reads from or writes in, only Linux manages this partition.

Once you have installed Linux, you can resize the first partition and then create others, even compatible with Windows OS. You can perfectly have 5 partitions of 49 Gb and one Linux-Swap partition.

At this point, you’re free from being a MS/Crapple sheep!

Once you get up and running with linux you can start playing around with desktop environments. (DE’s). DE’s are how the OS looks (yes you have the power to change the look; yes, you can install and run multiple DE’s for each linux install. For instance Debian/Ubuntu you can pick from a number of environments such as GNOME, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and MATE. Fedora's default desktop environment is GNOME, but there are also Fedora spins of other desktop environments, such as KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and MATE.
Here is a good synopsis of DE’s [link to lifehacker.com]

I will check back to see if you have any questions. Hope this helps!!