Ubuntu Operating System-Part 1

I had initially planned to have a journal of my technical forays along with my views on varied subjects so that people can know me well when they read my blog. But after 2 months with just 6 posts in the blog and with none of them as technical ones I think my blog has not went the way it should have went.So starting today I will be putting up a series of articles related to Ubuntu operating system.Recently, I put my hands on the ubuntu operating system. And I must say that I was blown off by the first impression it created.

Ubuntu (literally meaning mankind) is a linux distro which can be delievered straight to your home without any postal costs too. They just redefined free software. One can order for the free Cds by clicking on the url https://shipit.ubuntu.com/.
They just ask you to make up a new account where you give your address and email id so that they can contact you and then you can order free Cds from this url. Amazing isnt it.

When you open up the CD, you see an endorsement from Nelson Mandela. The first impression of ubuntu is great. What we get is a live CD which automatically runs the operating system without installation to the hard drive. So you can get the preview of the operating system, if you don't like it you can just dump it.

Over with the first impression, you would like to install it on the Hard drive. Now this is where there is still a room for improvement. The installation of ubuntu, especially along with a Windows edition is not exactly fun. You have to know a lot of things before you can start off with the installation. I will outline the various things in this article.

First of all, one must know about the linux filesystem. A linux partition is neither a FAT32 or an NTFS partition. It is based on other formats (currently ext3 is being used). The drives in linux are not alphabetically ordered like in windows sucs as C drive, D drive etc. Rather there is a root (/) from which other things are derived. However, there is an analogy which will explain more.
Consider
/ as your C: drive in windows
/home/username as analogous to C:/Documents and Settings/Username/
The Linux system has more folders too for other purposes.

Secondly, one must know about the need of a swap partition in Linux. Now ideally the swap partition must be equal to double the memory taken up by RAM. So for instance if one has a memory of 256KB then swap must be 512 MB. One has to make the swap partition at the time of installtion.


Now during the installation there will come a dialog box, in which you will have to select "maually partition" in order to preserve the previous instalations an your data too. Now as you must have already emptied one of your drives, select that drive and click on delete partition. Ideally the root partition must be of 5-6 GB as more than that will not be required. Create a root partition with ext3 formatting and a swap partition of size double the amount of RAM.

Afterwards the installation can proceed smoothly. One can also encounter a problem with the detection of hardware drivers but mostly all the drivers are recognised by Ubuntu. If a particular driver is not available it is always good to check on the net and posting in ubuntuforums.org and see if people over there can help you out.