Installing Lubuntu 3/3

[sgreger1]

Within distros that have the same "lineage," you can sort of switch on the fly to a certain extent, sgreger. I had a friend who needed to have either Red Hat or Fedora (forget which one) for a class, and after it was done he decided to play around with his repos, and managed to morph it into CentOS without having to reinstall. Although, it must be said it's more safe and easy to just reinstall if you want to change distros. I think you were going to be doing it anyway, based on what I saw in another thread, but you should make sure to give yourself a separate /home partition, rather than just having /home be on your / partition. With a separate /home partition, it's easy to keep all your old files and stuff if you either need to reinstall Ubuntu or decide to try out another distro. You'll be able to just tell the installer to install the OS to your old / partition and leave /home as it is when you go through it.

Yah since I am doing this from scratch I am going to partition the /home seperate as there is no advantage to merging it with the / partition and if I brick it or if I want to switch something out I can just wipe the partition and install something new. Wish I could have done that with my existing hard drive but oddly enough I don't believe my computer came with the Win7 disc so i'm stuck with how they had it initially set up when I bought it. I'll have to double check because if I have the disc than I am going to put my Win7 OS on a seperate partition too. I've had too many computers crash for one reason or another and would rather have the OS seperate, even though I have everything backed up.

[shikitohno]

Within distros that have the same "lineage," you can sort of switch on the fly to a certain extent, sgreger. I had a friend who needed to have either Red Hat or Fedora (forget which one) for a class, and after it was done he decided to play around with his repos, and managed to morph it into CentOS without having to reinstall. Although, it must be said it's more safe and easy to just reinstall if you want to change distros. I think you were going to be doing it anyway, based on what I saw in another thread, but you should make sure to give yourself a separate /home partition, rather than just having /home be on your / partition. With a separate /home partition, it's easy to keep all your old files and stuff if you either need to reinstall Ubuntu or decide to try out another distro. You'll be able to just tell the installer to install the OS to your old / partition and leave /home as it is when you go through it.

[sgreger1]

Only within the Ubuntu family. You wouldn't necessarily have Arch, Slackware, fedora...whatever stuff. That's a whole other ball of wax. Most of Ubuntu's actually Debian, but customized a bit, and a lot of things done for you. All a distro really is is a collection of independent packages organized in a repository. Some are pretty much vanilla like Arch, and others have been customized to one extent or another. Ubuntu or Mint are recommended to new users cause some of the foreign work has been done for you. It's like playing bagpipes. None of the individual bits is especially hard, but combining them all together makes it a challenge. Ubuntu is like having someone blow and squeeze while you concentrate on the fingering. Debian is like blowing and fingering, and having someone else do the squeezing. Arch is like doing it all yourself. Gentoo is like building your own pipes from a kit, and LinuxFromScratch is like getting your raw materials from the jungle, and building your own pipes :^D Which is to say, that something like Debian might be a bit much for someone coming from Windows. It's not hard, but you have other things better to work on, and Ubuntu takes care of that for you. If you want more at some point in the future, there' hundreds of other distros you can try, that fill just about every conceivable niche you could think of.

Anyway, it's hard to recommend a de for somebody. Anything in the Ubuntu family will work well for a range of people from n00b to expert. It's all in what you like, and how you interact with your desktop.

Edit:
You don't have to worry about what each version comes with. It's all available in the repos if you want to try something. You can install, and uninstall as you see fit. You can strip it down to nothing but a command line, or put everything in; it's up to you. Installing a stripped version like Lubuntu doesn't keep you from any bit of software. You just add what you want.

+1 for successfull usage of a bagpipe analogy embeded in a linux conversation.

+2 for making it so eerily easy to misread that as a porn scene.

[lxskllr]

:^D

I thought of that as I wrote it, but it was the best analogy I could come up with at the time.

[voodooman]

omg. scanning your comment' i totally missed this bit:

It's like playing bagpipes.

...then i took this in a whole 'nother context:

Ubuntu is like having someone blow and squeeze while you concentrate on the fingering. Debian is like blowing and fingering, and having someone else do the squeezing. Arch is like doing it all yourself.

[lxskllr]

Oh so it's easy to switch distros once you have Ubuntu installed? Like you can just choose a different distro and easily change it? Sweet.

Only within the Ubuntu family. You wouldn't necessarily have Arch, Slackware, fedora...whatever stuff. That's a whole other ball of wax. Most of Ubuntu's actually Debian, but customized a bit, and a lot of things done for you. All a distro really is is a collection of independent packages organized in a repository. Some are pretty much vanilla like Arch, and others have been customized to one extent or another. Ubuntu or Mint are recommended to new users cause some of the foreign work has been done for you. It's like playing bagpipes. None of the individual bits is especially hard, but combining them all together makes it a challenge. Ubuntu is like having someone blow and squeeze while you concentrate on the fingering. Debian is like blowing and fingering, and having someone else do the squeezing. Arch is like doing it all yourself. Gentoo is like building your own pipes from a kit, and LinuxFromScratch is like getting your raw materials from the jungle, and building your own pipes :^D Which is to say, that something like Debian might be a bit much for someone coming from Windows. It's not hard, but you have other things better to work on, and Ubuntu takes care of that for you. If you want more at some point in the future, there' hundreds of other distros you can try, that fill just about every conceivable niche you could think of.

Anyway, it's hard to recommend a de for somebody. Anything in the Ubuntu family will work well for a range of people from n00b to expert. It's all in what you like, and how you interact with your desktop.

Edit:
You don't have to worry about what each version comes with. It's all available in the repos if you want to try something. You can install, and uninstall as you see fit. You can strip it down to nothing but a command line, or put everything in; it's up to you. Installing a stripped version like Lubuntu doesn't keep you from any bit of software. You just add what you want.

[sgreger1]

Exactly. You'd use something like this on old machines, but a bit newer than ancient, or if you value light weight over anything. Personally, I'm a fan of eye candy as long as it doesn't drag the machine down. If I were to install one, I'd choose Xubuntu. It's not the prettiest, but it can be made to look pretty good, and it works like desktops have forever. It's like a low budget Gnome2 which went in a differnt direction last year. Gnome is a lot like Unity now.

The other big de is KDE which is kinda similar to Win7. It's got a lot of glitzy tuff, but the configuration is like flying an airplane. Tons of options, and it's probably the heaviest de available. You'd get tat with Kubuntu.

If you Google them, you should get an idea of what the system's about, and the philosophy behind each variation. They all have a niche they fill, and whether that niche is right for you is a matter of preference. Once you install 1 *buntu, you can install the rest through the package manager, and if you don't like them, uninstall them. You can have them all on your system at the same time, but of course it'll cost disk space.

Oh so it's easy to switch distros once you have Ubuntu installed? Like you can just choose a different distro and easily change it? Sweet.


So considering you had a computer where you didn't care about how heavy it was, as in you have unlimited disc space and unlimited processing power, which one comes prepacked with the most software and/or the "prettiest" interface. My fear of using the really heavy ones like the KDE is that usually those are for veteran users and not great for beginners. I think i'll just start with regular old Ubutnu 11.5 and then try other flavors once I get the hang of it. But which would you choose if you didn't care about space or processing power requirements?

[lxskllr]

Excelent writeup Lx! What are the advantages of having this vs. any other distro? By "lightweight version that uses lighter desktop environment and lighter packages", do you mean it's just a smaller leaner version of Ubuntu that will take up less space and that doesn't come prepacked with as much software?

Exactly. You'd use something like this on old machines, but a bit newer than ancient, or if you value light weight over anything. Personally, I'm a fan of eye candy as long as it doesn't drag the machine down. If I were to install one, I'd choose Xubuntu. It's not the prettiest, but it can be made to look pretty good, and it works like desktops have forever. It's like a low budget Gnome2 which went in a differnt direction last year. Gnome is a lot like Unity now.

The other big de is KDE which is kinda similar to Win7. It's got a lot of glitzy tuff, but the configuration is like flying an airplane. Tons of options, and it's probably the heaviest de available. You'd get tat with Kubuntu.

If you Google them, you should get an idea of what the system's about, and the philosophy behind each variation. They all have a niche they fill, and whether that niche is right for you is a matter of preference. Once you install 1 *buntu, you can install the rest through the package manager, and if you don't like them, uninstall them. You can have them all on your system at the same time, but of course it'll cost disk space.

[sgreger1]

Excelent writeup Lx! What are the advantages of having this vs. any other distro? By "lightweight version that uses lighter desktop environment and lighter packages", do you mean it's just a smaller leaner version of Ubuntu that will take up less space and that doesn't come prepacked with as much software?

[lxskllr]

Answer any questions asked, and we're installing. Use this time to read a bit about your new system(click the arrows)...

We're done! Pick the choice you want. Stay in the live environment, or reboot to the permanent system...

Enter your login credentials when asked. In my case, it was "lubuntu" as the user, with "password" as the password.
Update Manager popped up with new updates when I logged in. Click install, enter your password, and it'll download and install the updates.

That's it! You now how a fully updated Lubuntu system.