Day 2: Getting everything I need for the perfect windows replacement

My goal for today was to figure out the very basics of the commands, and get all the applications I need installed. This proved to be far more simple than I had ever imagined. I first want to say hats off to the incredible Ubuntu community. You can literally find anything you want to know with just a simple Google search. So, hats off to you folks, hopefully I will be of some help in the future...but for now I'm just trying to survive the first few days!!

Okay, onto the "nitty gritty". Now, I knew when I was getting into this mess that there were things that were going to be different. For instance, Administrator for us Windows folks, is "root" in Linux lingo. Fairly basic stuff that is quickly understood after just a few minutes of using Linux. In order to act as "root" when using your "terminal" you need to use the command "sudo"...The first time that you do that in any session, it asks for your administrator password.

Luckily for me, things like command line come pretty easy. However, as a true test, I wanted to pretend like I knew nothing of the sort. So, I went on search to find the way on how to set up the perfect Windows replacement desktop. I found that here. This guide is great! It, however, suggests about 4 different types of music players, video players etc etc. So I will skip all of the bloat, and just tell you what I reccommend after testing them out.

Here comes some Linux "mumbo jumbo" so just follow along...

The first thing I needed to find was the terminal which is under Applications>>Accessories>>Terminal

From Screenshots

Then you need to run the following command

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

This will pull up a page that you need to go into and enable the intrepid partner (because some packages such as opera are in that repository)

Edit these lines to make it look just like this and save the file once your done.

[...]
## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's
## 'partner' repository. This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is
## offered by Canonical and the respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu
## users.
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu intrepid partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu intrepid partner
[...]

After that, your going to need to import the medibuntu repository by running this line:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

You will now need to import your gpg-key and update your package list.(sounds like I know what I am doing!! :-D)

Run:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

and last, but not least you will need to run the following code due to a glitch in Ubuntu 8.10 that wont show 3rd party apps in the "Synaptic Package Manager" (we will get to that in a second)

Run:

sudo update-apt-xapian-index


That was the hardest part for me to get through. Now, on to bigger and brighter things. I have never been more impressed with something than I am with this "Synaptic Package Manager". It simplfies every single aspect of installing the needed programs to replace a Windows Desktop.

It can be found by going to System>>Administration>>Synaptic Package Manager and enter your password.

From Screenshots

Here is the easy part, just search for what you need and mark it for installation.

This is a list of exactly what I installed

acroread
amarok (music player)
flashplugin-nonfree
sun-java6* (except sun-java6-doc)
mplayer
non-free-codecs
ubuntu-restricted-extras
thunderbird
gnucash
bittornado
bittornado-gui
awn-manager

After I marked them all I just clicked the "apply" button, and all the work was done for me!!

We will get into reviewing the programs that I installed in future posts. That's it for tonight, I have to say that I have had an incredibly fun time playing with Ubuntu. literally no hang-ups yet. I figured that I would spend the first few days ripping my hair out, but its been an absolute pleasure to use. At this point, Ubuntu beats Windows in user-friendliness hands down.

Todays Score

Windows Vista [0]

Ubuntu 8.10 [1]


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