Rickford Grant - Ubuntu for Non-Geeks: A Pain-Free, Get-Things-Done Guide

Copyright 2010

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Rickford Grant

My computing life began long ago, in the Commodore/Atari days. No doubt inspired by Alan Alda's television commercials at the time, I purchased my first machine, an Atari 600XL with a cassette drive for storage and 16KB of RAMmore than I thought I would ever need. Most of my time on that machine, I must admit, was spent playing cartridge-based games and transcribing pages and pages of machine code from the now-defunct magazine Antic to create even more games. Eventually, my interest in computers increased, especially after seeing my first (and actually the first) Macintosh at the UCLA bookstore. The very in-your-face nature of the Mac's operating system caused me to become an operating system maniac. To date, I have worked with a lot of different operating systems, including Mac OS up to and including OS X, every Windows version from 3.1 to 7, and even IBM's much forgotten OS/2.

Though tempted to join the Linux fray, I continued to steer away from it for a long time because I could not help but see it, as so many others do, as a system for never-seen-the-light-of-day-faced, late-night Dr Pepperdrinking, Domino's-pizza-eating compu-geeks. However, when I moved to Japan and was suddenly surrounded by machines loaded with Japanese versions of Windows, I encountered numerous problems, especially language constraints. Since everything, including Help files, was written in Japanese, I ended up using only a fraction of the full potential of most software. Then there were those annoying Windows-type problems, such as the constant freezes and restarts and the gradual system slowdowns, which were eventually remedied only by reinstalling the system. Getting the software I needed to do the things I wanted to do also took its toll on my wallet, and I began to rethink my initial resistance to Linux. With Linux's multilingual support, system stability, and extensive and free software packages, there were plenty of incentives for me to get over my preconceived notions about the typical Linux user.

After a few failed attempts at getting Linux to work on the oddball, Frankenstein-like collection of junk that was my computer, I finally succeeded with a CD-based Knoppix distribution, which worked well enough to reel me in a little further. I moved on to Mandrake (now known as Mandriva), since that was claimed to be the most newbie-friendly version, and then I tried SUSE as well, which I found to be rather quirky. Eventually, I tried Red Hat Linux and stuck to that because it just didn't give me any grief; and I, like most others, do not want any more grief than necessary.

I started off with my three desktop machines at work and home set up as dual-boot systems running both Linux and Windows, but I gradually found myself using only Linux. Although I had expected to encounter numerous limitations in Linux that would force me to return to Windows often, I instead found that I had actually increased my productivity. Other than lack of native support for Windows streaming media, I was actually able to do more because of the extensive software base that was now installed on my machine. Without having to fork out money that I could ill afford to spend, I was able to manipulate my digital images, rip songs from CDs, create vector drawings, create PDF files, and do a variety of other things that I wasn't able to do under Windows. It was only a matter of time before my dual-boot setups became full Linux-only setups. I ceased to be a Windows user.

Since those early Linux days, I have gone on to try a number of other distributions, including JAMD, Xandros, Damn Small Linux, and more recently, Ubuntu. I am happy to report that things have continued to get easier and better, and those early frustrations I suffered trying to get things to work with this machine or that piece of hardware have become more and more a thing of the past. Best of all, with even more distributions being available as live CDs, which allow you to try Linux before you actually install it, you usually don't even have to take a leap of faith to get started.

Of course, getting started in the world of Linux can be a bit intimidating, especially when you don't have anyone around to help you out. In fact, I actually started writing this book as a primer on Red Hat 9 for my mother, whom I had just given one of my extra computers with Red Hat installed. At that time, I was not planning on writing a book at all; it was just that there really weren't any books out there written with average users in mind. The books available then were all more or less geek-oriented, and as such, they would just not do for the mater. I thus created a somewhat elaborate instruction set that would tell her everything she might want to do on the machine in a way that she could understand.