[Starscream]

Hey all.

Due to my finally getting a nice huge external hard drive to store my crap on, I've decided to make good use of my extra space and finally get myself a respectable operating system. Go me.

I have some programming experience, but not a ton, and would like some advice on how best to go about this.

My plan is to partition my hard drive, install Ubuntu, and get Beryl to go along with it (much of my other software is already open source, and I can pick that on my own). Unfortunately I have only a vague idea of how to go about this. There seems to be plenty of guides online, but I'm not certain whether I need to use a specific one that matches my needs. If any of you can tell me what to do (or just post a link to a tutorial that works for my set-up) it would be very much appreciated.

My machine's stats:
CPU: Intel Core Duo 1.6 GHz
Ram: 2GB
Video Card: ATI Mobility Radeon X1400
Current OS: Windows Vista Home Premium
Hard Drive: 120 GB

Any advice you can give me would be most helpful. For instance, is my video card good enough to get Beryl? How much space do I need to make available? Will I need a firewall, or is Linux as secure as everyone who uses it tells me? Any problems on the horizon I should look out for?

Thanks in advance,
Starscream.

[arvind_khadri]

hi,welcome to the forums....beryl doesn't need high end hardware at all...so you can start off with your Beryl....and yeah Linux is very much secure.... ...firewall comes as default in every Linux distros...the iptables are the firewall ....the package Beryl might be of some MB's so i dont think you need to worry bout that....To know more about iptables use
Code:
$ man iptables
:Code



Happy Linuxing

[jmadero]

The best way is to install and read how to's as you go along the way.

Beryl no longer exists, it is not compiz and comes installed with Ubuntu. If you want the GUI version to control the effects do "sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager" in a terminal window.

Some basics would be to learn about repositories (google repositories Ubuntu) or something similar. With Ubuntu you'll have synaptic package manager to download most of what you need. If you want some programs that aren't listed see if you can add a repo to get them in synaptic (apt-get is the same as synaptic just not graphical). As for a firewall, I've gone with and without one, if you have highly sensitive data you might as well put one on but in general, Ubuntu is safe enough without a separate firewall.

As for space, that's up to you. I installed Hardy Beta on a 4 gig partition (mounted to / which is just the root os) then I have a 10 gig /home partition. I've used about 2.5 gigs of the root and 2.5 gigs of the /home. It's a good thing to separate the two, / will be like your program files in windows while /home would be like your documents and user files (such as a thunderbird email file with your email, firefox bookmarks, etc...). Desktop is also part of the /home (the directory to desktop will be /home/user/Desktop).

Hope that helps! Have fun with your new setup