I laugh whenever I heard someone make a comment that “Linux is hard to install”, or that “Linux is only for geeks and nerds”.

Installing Ubuntu can literally be as easy as typing in some very basic information, and clicking next a few times. Almost all of the time (except in rare cases of unusual hardware) you will wind up with a perfectly functional, perfectly speedy install without (like in Windows) having to go through and find drivers, and applications on your own. Those few mouse-clicks get you pretty much everything you need to use and enjoy your PC.

There is, however always some room for tweaking. I can tweak out Windows XP with the best of them, and make it an even leaner, meaner OS than it already is. The same thing applies to Ubuntu. There are many little things you can do, some very safe, some a little bit more risky that you can do to really improve Ubuntu’s speed, as well as make it a little more fun to use.

Disclaimer: Please note that these are my personal processes and procedures for installing, tweaking and configuring Ubuntu to meet my own personal needs and expectations. You may not

I’ll be the first to admit it - when it comes to Linux, I am a habitual “Distro-hopper”. I don’t like being a distro-hopper, and I haven’t always been a distro-hopper.

I started off with (and used briefly) Red Hat (before Fedora) on the recommendation of a friend, and I used KDE (long-term) because he said it was better. I soon migrated too (and loved - well, still love) Slackware, and I used it for a few years. I used Slackware exclusively until I got my first AMD64 machine back in 2005, and I wanted a x86_64 distro to run on it. I had been hearing a lot about this new distro called Ubuntu - it was quickly becoming the most popular Linux distribution that had ever been created, and I checked it out with version 5.04. YUK! GNOME! and it was BROWN! I soon discovered there was a “sister-distro” called Kubuntu that used KDE instead - “ahhhh - much better” I said to myself. I used Kubuntu almost exclusively (with some experimenting, and side-tracking) from 5.04 all the way until 7.10 when things majorly broke apart for me. I never could get the 7.10 release of Ubuntu (in

The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices.

…a spokesman for Becta said the problem was that Microsoft required schools to have licences for every PC in a school that might use its software, whether they were actually doing so or running something else. Read the full article on BBC News (via Slashdot)