Suilenroc

EDIT: Three month later update at the beginning of page 10.

Pre-prelude: This is a post about how I entered the world of Linux, how it was easier than I ever thought, and how I grabbed Linux by the horns, rode it around, and never looked back. If you're having second thoughts about Linux for you, then this is a post that you'll want to read.

Let me start out by giving you a bit of an introduction to who I am. On this forum, a few others around the internet, I am known as Suilenroc. (It's my real life middle name backwards, in case you were wondering.) In real life, I'm a Senior in High School in Southern California. I've always loved technology and computers. I remember when we got our first computer, an e-machines running Windows 95. I was amazed when I played a game from a floppy.

Over the years, my love of computers grew. I was the de-facto tech master in my 4th and 5th grade, the only one able to find that elusive file on the old G4 Mac we had in the room. About 3 years ago, I decided to build a computer. I was angered at the computer that I had been using, who's specs I don't even quite remember. So I gobbled up every piece of information on building a computer that I could find on the internet, and, about 2 months after I set my mind to it, I had a working computer. GeForce 7900 PCI-E, AMD 4600+, a mid-end system. Since then, I've built up a functional knowledge of most pieces in a computer, and built 3 more of them, the most recent being my sig rig.

About 3 weeks ago, I decided that I was happy with my current situation. I had a good system that could run most any game at full specs, and it was time to push my knowledge even farther. I dabbled in coding with Python, and that drew me into the open-source community. From there, I found Linux. Now, Linux had always been a bit of a presence in my computing life. It was that Monolithic structure standing in the background, a place where people used command lines for everything and code was written daily, far beyond the purview of the normal computer user like myself. But hell, I was bored. So I looked at it anyways. What I found surprised me. I found a feature-rich, GUI-laden, fast, and, most of all, free group of operating systems. And so, I hardened my resolve to learn it. I partitioned my HDD, backed up my files, and installed what seemed to me to be the most user friendly version, Ubuntu, version 8.04 LTS.

Now starts my true narrative. This is a story about how I got my Linux on, and how it was much easier than I ever thought it would be.

My first installation of Ubuntu was rough. I accidentally deleted my entire Vista partition. But I had prepared for that, and had a whole backup of my important files, so I didn't fret. I patiently reinstalled Vista, making sure to format my hard drives nice and neatly. I left 30GB to Vista itself, and 200GB to all of my Data. Those partitions were formatted in NTFS. The rest of the space, about 50GB, went to Ubuntu. 45GB went to the OS, and 5 went to the Swap File. They were formatted, naturally, in EXT3 and SWAP, respectively. The installation was great, nice and easy. Time Zone? LA. Format? Easy. It installed in about 30 minutes in total.

So there I was, with two freshly installed Operating systems on my computer. First, I got my Vista all set up, something that I was used to. After that, I stepped off into Ubuntu.

I was met with a desktop that I, personally, consider to be rather Ugly. Sure, the art's nice, and the edges are smooth, but brown? Brown?! Needless to say, that must be changed. The first order of business, though, was installing the nvidia drivers. I knew from my research that the best way to do that was with a program called "Envy." I downloaded that, set it up according to the instructions, restarted, and hey presto, I had a nice desktop. It's full 1680x1050 pixellicious goodness was sleek, but still brown. So I went to a site that I had heard of called www.gnome-look.org. There I found a veritable treasure trove of themes and scenes, icons and pointers, wallpapers, backgrounds, screensavers, and something called scripts. I looked through it, and found a theme, background, and icon set that I liked. I downloaded them, and promptly realized that I had no idea how to install them.

From my previous adventures on the internet, I had learned at least this much: Google is your friend. So, I googled. "How to install Ubuntu themes." I got a few entries that were years old. "No good," I thought. So I changed it to this: "How to install Ubuntu themes 8.04." Ah! That's better. Since then, I've learned that, if I get info that isn't applicable to my version of Ubuntu, I must simply add the version number to the end. Eventually, I learned to put the theme package, still zipped up, in the /.themes directory. But...well, I had no idea where in hell that was.

This was starting to get to me, but I soldiered on. I found an amazing guide that explained to me the Linux filesystem, how files with "." in front of their names are hidden, and how I had to press alt-h to view them in the window navigator, which I also found out was known as "Nautilus." So I went to my home folder, pressed alt-h, and hey! There it was, .themes. I moved the package there my dragging it from my desktop. I also moved the background there for safe keeping. Next, I learned that Icons have to be put in the...you guessed it, .icons folder. So I put them there. I then right clicked on my desktop, decided that "change desktop background" sounded vaguely like it would have to do with themes, and went to the theme menu of that screen. I installed the theme that I had just downloaded with the install button, and initialized it. I then applied the desktop, and the icon theme. And wow was it nice.

Now, I could get some programs! I had heard alot about this "Synaptic Package Manager," so I checked it out. I went to System-Administration-Package Manager. And wow, it was nice. I quickly fetched my favorite programs, namely, Mozilla Thunderbird and Sunbird (They had it!), and installed them. They set up nicely, looked sexy, I couldn't ask for more.

Over time, I found some more appearance changers. Avant Window Navigator was the best, I think. But all of these guides that asked me to put stuff in the console mystified me. So, I learned about the console with this guide: http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/linuxcommand.org/ That thing was a godsend, and is essential reading for ANY linux newbie.

Now, here I am, weeks later. I had just set up my dad's laptop with Ubuntu, and he loves it. The wireless was a pain to set up, but, with the help of guides and google, I figured it out.

Earlier today, I was reading the "Linux Challenge" post on these boards. It dawned on me, I had just done that all on my own. It was right, the first step was the hardest, but it was also the most worthwhile step that I've ever taken in my computing life. I also realized that, up until this very moment, I had always had something to "get working" in Linux. Either the printer, the video card, the sound card, it was something. But today, I sat down at my computer...and I had nothing to get done. And I realized: I'm using Linux. So I thought that I would write this narrative as a way to try and show people that, no matter how hard the first step may seem, it's more worthwhile that you'll ever imagine. I don't want to go back to windows at all. I still do, from time to time, to get my TF2 fix, but I always reboot to Ubuntu as soon as I'm done.

I hope that this doesn't come off as pretentious. Thank you, OCN, for your continued support. I just hope that I can now give support back.

-Suilenroc

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OJX

I tried ubuntu just a a few days ago
install was easy
setup was easy
changing settings and customizing it to match it like what you see in peoples screenshots = pain in the neck
I quit.

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Firefox + Aero ∎ XP Theme DL
Steam ∎ My Rig

Suilenroc

Well, I at least didn't find it that hard. Put one thing in one directory, another in another directory, hit a few buttons, and you have a sexy desktop. Easy enough.


Edit: And even if you do find it too hard to change the visuals in Ubuntu, at least the option is always there, and fully supported. What can you change in windows? Border color? Transparency? Not all too much, at least not in a way that's supported by Microsoft.

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DigitalSonata

Cool story, my first Linux experience was with Redhat 5. Horrible distro, no real package management system, no dependency fetching, total PITA. I used Windows for a few years, then tried Ubuntu 5, it was OK but still alot of things needed to be fixed. I used Knoppix and Debian for a while, then tried to get Arch working but every time after I updated either I would get Kernel panics or Grub would misplace the kernel. I went back to Ubuntu (version 6 at the time) and used that for a long time before playing around with Arch on another computer. I then tried to put Gentoo on my main box, GUI the installer was apparently a release, but I would call it an alpha at best. I should have backed up my stuff, but I didn't, and the GUI partitioner overwrote my media partition without confirmation. IMO things like this should be labeled beta or testing, this installer was not ready for release. I was turned off of Gentoo for a while, so I installed Ubuntu 7 and it was pretty sweet. I then got fed up with OSX on my laptop so I installed Ubuntu 7 on there, PPC support was (and still is) terrible, so I reinstalled OSX. When Ubuntu 8.04 came out I did a dist-upgrade on my main box and everything broke, so I had to do a fresh install of 8.04. After that I decided to try Gentoo again on my laptop (since the PPC package issues with Ubuntu could be avoided ) and have been using that for a while.

Next up for you: try XFCE (or maybe even Fluxbox/E17)

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Check out my guides on How To: Use the internet anonymously, How To: Build your own router, and Tip: A Sensible Linux Partitioning Scheme I did error10's Windows Challenge and I now live in a mental institution!

Suilenroc

XFCE? eheh, what's that?

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DigitalSonata

Ubuntu uses Gnome for a DE/WM (Desktop Enviroment/Window Manager), XFCE is a different one, its much lighter (RAM/CPU usage), minimalistic, and more customizable. Fluxbox & E17 are even lighter ones.

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Check out my guides on How To: Use the internet anonymously, How To: Build your own router, and Tip: A Sensible Linux Partitioning Scheme I did error10's Windows Challenge and I now live in a mental institution!

purdueman

Window manager

Ubuntu uses Gnome, Xubuntu uses XFCE.

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Suilenroc

Ah, alright, I always thought that it was known as the "X windows manager." Therein lies the confusion.

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DigitalSonata

X is the backend for almost all Linux distros' GUIs. Read more here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System

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Check out my guides on How To: Use the internet anonymously, How To: Build your own router, and Tip: A Sensible Linux Partitioning Scheme I did error10's Windows Challenge and I now live in a mental institution!

lattyware

Nice post. I often try and post stuff to give people a reason to try Linux, but as I'm so used to it, it can be hard to post something like this. Kudos.

As to your post. I'd like to note Envy is a bit outdated - now-a-days you are better off using the Restricted Driver Manager, which comes with Ubuntu - as it's most integral to the system, and less likely to cause problems, not to mention get updated more easily.

I don't think the default styling of Ubuntu is ugly, but I also don't think it's Brown. It's Orange. Then again, my favourite colour is Orange, so I'm probably biased.

I'd also like to note that it's not /.themes, it's ~/.themes, '~' means your home directory, so ~/.themes is the same as /home/username/.themes.

I think this post shows what someone with an open mind can get from Linux.

As to what to try in the future, I'd check out KDE4.1 - it's not entirely stable at the moment, not perfect, but it is very nice. If you like OS X, I'd say KDE4.1 will probably be a nicer environment for you. I'm running it right now (under Arch). Gnome will probably still be preferable for the majority of poeple mind. You can get liveCDs with KDE4.1 on.

Oh, and XFCE is a desktop environment like Gnome or KDE. It's similar to Gnome, but lighter on system resources.

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Lattyware | Main (Sig) Rig: gBOX42 | Lan Rig: gLAN42
Never been convinced by Linux? Here is a challenge. | Using LVM
Scratched Disc? | Guide To LAN Parties | Writing a GUI application in Python/Glade
Etching an image into your case. | Wireless Access Points: Easy wireless networking.
A Member Of The OCN Anime/Manga Club
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