Got "Ubuntued"?

For my first project on this new blog, I am going to write about my experince migrating to Ubuntu . Now, I have been a Linux User for a while (2-3 years) now, but, I mostly stuck to Suse 9.3 and 10.0. I recently bought a laptop (the Lenovo Ideapad Y530) that came preloaded with Vista, so I figured what better time to try a new distro than now.

First off, I have to say a big hats off the to the folks who come up with names of the releases:

• Ubuntu 6.06.2 LTS (Dapper Drake)
• Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)
• Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)
• Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)
• Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS (Hardy Heron)
• Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)

Alright, since I already had a DVD burned with Gutsy Gibbon on it, I popped it into my new laptop, rebooted the machine, and was on my way to setting up my dual-boot Vista/ Ubuntu machine in no time. I decided to stick the GUI option (amazing how much Linux distro's have evolved over time) for the install and it worked like a charm.

Ubuntu releases come bundled with the GRUB loader, that takes care of managing loading multiple OS installs by providing a simple set of menu options to choose from. One thing to note is that, by default, it sets the first two options in the menu to the Ubuntu install and the remaining (Win Vista, in my case) OS'es follow after that. And, by default, the very first one is selected on startup. It is very easy to change these settings and more (like the amount of time it sits at the boot menu, before contiuing with the default), by simply editing the menu.lst file under /boot/grub. To start with, I set my default to the "other OS'es" option, so that it sits there forever, until I select one or the other. I did this, because I am undecided if I want to default to one or the other, for now.