I think Ubuntu is awesome one a laptop, I used Ubuntu on a small laptop for a few months before buying a new laptop and deciding to switch to Gentoo.

Ubuntu is easy to use but you’ll get a bit of experience if there’s any bugs. That’s why is always good to Google any problems you have, 8/10 times someone will have encountered the same problem and will give you an answer. The Ubuntu forums are SUPER helpful, they have a great community and lots of people post there all the time. It’s always good to know people in person who will help you if you become completely lost. However, Ubuntu is pretty easy to install and anyone can do the basics without becoming a nerd, though I think it’s always very useful to good deep and learn some command-line stuff, might help you out a lot.

About the partitioning, I’ve done the same thing to my new laptop with Gentoo and it should be the same with Ubuntu. I’m afraid I can’t help you with that part, my buddy helped me set it up so I can’t really remember how to do it. If you search the Ubuntu forums you should be able to find an answer.

All the best to you installing Ubuntu:)

Michael Croes:

Thanks for the comment and clearing things up about Gentoo. The -bins are always a great alternative to long compiling. I installed Open Office and FireFox on Gentoo too using the -bin when emerging. My workstation has 4 GBs of RAM and it murders Gentoo but compiling still takes a while.

Gentoo is fast but I think I can make it faster with some tuning. I’m the type of person freaks out about tuning haha.

Thanks for the link. I use that site and the Gentoo Wiki, two great resources.

-Clinton

In response to comments made here:
Gentoo does NOT need a lot of memory. I’m running virtual machines on my machine with 1G and 512M memory allocated, I also ran one with just 128M of memory allocated and that worked fine. If you also add some swap space you don’t have to worry at all. There are some applications that will eat up some space in /tmp and eat a bit more memory while compiling, like OpenOffice.org, Firefox and some more large packages that are not split into several (Gnome and KDE are split up in small packages). However, for most of those large packages there are -bin versions which don’t require you to compile yourself.

Summary:
If you want to use Gentoo, go to gentoo.org, read the Gentoo Handbook and if you think you can handle it give it a try.

I have been using fedora @ work for 3 years now. I am a basic user, with no advanced Linux knowledge..

recently, I bought a laptop, and installed xp on it..now, I want to have ubunto too, hmm attracted by it’s UI .. mac like experience .. how will you rate ubuntu experience on a laptop ?

and, is it safe to install it along with XP ? how should I backup my windows partition before installing it ?

thanks

I wish I was able to do more with customization though, and from your review, Gentoo sounds tempting. But then if it does need a lot of RAM, I don’t think my laptop with cut it.

I’ll keep an eye out for your tutorials, to see if they can convince me otherwise.

Dom

biju – That’s strange that mounting didn’t work. It worked on mine just fine. It seems like the devices are all different among computers, e.g. my laptop calls the USB sdb1 and on my friends computer it’s sdc1.

Drew – It’s great that you found a distro that suited you. That’s the bet thing about Linux. And..yeah, one thing that I’ve learned it that Gentoo needs a lot of RAM. Every time you compile a program it makes all the difference. I have 4GB of RAM in my workstation so I should be OK.

Gentoo is great for learning from, and their documentation is very good. It is not for the CLI-phobic but it really gets you into the skunk-works.

I moved to Ubuntu because I wasted too many eventing tweaking and fiddling with Gentoo, downloading packages (dial-up at the time) and installing (P3 500Mhz w/256MB Ram). I’ve moved into wanting something that just works. OpenSUSE also fits the bill.

i love linux but it worrying me a lot.