Today I woke up with the sad realization that I’ve never used Linux extensively and felt a sudden urge to reformat the Dell (Windows 7) laptop and put Kubuntu on it (don’t hit me, I’m a KDE guy) so during around noon I decided to do this. [FYI, I had a day off :^)]
Basically all that I did to install it was go to the Kubuntu site and download the x86 version from the Mirrors.Kernel.org mirror (which btw was at 15mb/s) and burned it in Windows 7 onto a CD. I had joy in irony that Windows was burning the CD that would remove itself and I noticed that Windows 7 has a built-in ISO burner (I digress).
The install was fair, just like the Ubuntu installer simply placing a ‘K’ in front of every ‘Ubuntu’ and changing the logos from the orange to blue. However, at the last minute I decided that because the GRUB boot loader is so awesome that Windows would be safe and I kept it on as a separate partition, using the installers’ built-in partitioner. So after about an hour it was completely installed.
Every time I walk up to a computer I expect it to have certain pieces of software including but not limited to:
- Flash Player
- Adobe AIR
- VLC
- curl
- Pidgin (IM)
- Firefox
- perl
- Java VM
Today I’m going to work on items 1 thru 6.
The first, Flash Player was easy to install, almost as easy as installing something for Windows. Flash player downloads for Linux as a .deb file which only needs to be ‘opened with’ by (as in the case with Kubuntu) KPackageKit which basically just presents you with an install screen similar to installing a Firefox addon. Easy.
Next, lets do VLC. But considering how the majority of Linux applications are installed, using the apt-get command (in the terminal) we can also get curl, Pidgin, and Firefox with roughly the same command. I admit that this took me about ten minutes to figure out. Because apt-get is installing a program on your computer and modifying it in a way that could be harmful, you need administrative privileges. If you’re a die-hard Windows user who always makes yourself ‘admin’ because you are strong, mighty, and eat raw eggs for breakfast every morning before a seven mile run, stop. Linux, because it is derived from Unix, only dishes out high-level (or low-level depending on which way your chart goes, either way, the most privileged) rights on a task-by-task basis where the super user is queried every time you need to do something ‘dangerous’, thus you have to use to sudo command (it stands for super user do). After issuing a command with sudo you will be asked for an administrative or root password. After that lengthy description of why we need to do this, I’ll move on.
We now understand (superficially) that we need to prefix our command with sudo, the next part is apt-get and because we’re installing something it’s install and finally, the name of the package we’re installing, vlc, curl, pidgin, and firefox. **You can only install one package with each issued command so you will have to do this once for every application you’re installing.** So, here’s our finished command to install VLC sudo apt-get install vlc then you enter the administrative password when asked. But, we have a problem (possibly, I did.) I tried to apt-get on all of these and it didn’t work. Long story short, you have to update apt-get‘s library by using the update command, sudo apt-get update . To which you now provide your password and can now move on to get the applications mentioned above installed.
Tomorrow I’ll worry about getting the correct NVidia display driver and other furnishings done. After a day without Windows I felt good, but I have to say that nothing felt better than sitting down here in front of my Mac. It just feels so right. But, I will press on and continue exploring Linux. (Granted that Mac OS X and Linux share a common ancestor, it’s not too foreign.)