Did you ever wanted to ascend(Either ascend as in stargate, or nirvana as in buddhism)? As far as I know, even if you want to do it, it’s very hard to ascend. No one will ascend you(Daniel Jackson is a special case), you have to do it by yourself. But when it comes to computers, there are always hell of a lot of open source software and documentation. So, at least, let your computer to get ascended.

Step 1 : Install Ubuntu

When it comes to enlightment in computing, there is no doubt that I’m talking about linux (There is a x-windows manager in linux called enlightment, but I’m just refering to word enlightment - nirvana). If you are new to linux, I strongly suggest that you install Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a very popular linux distro, so it has a huge amount of users around the world; which simply means there are hell of a lot of tutorials, documentations and forums for it. However, if you want you can also choose another distro such as debain, gentoo, etc. It doesn’t really matter, after all it’s linux.

Step 2 : Upgrade your system

Linux is built using many small software modules, called libraries. Since all those are open source, even the 3rd party software developers use those libraries, and the libraries are developed independantly from the software, also get upgraded separately. Now, you might be wondering, what if I don’t have those libraries in my computer? Does the software comes with all it’s dependent libraries? No, they don’t. That’s why you have something called package managers(apt-get, synaptic). Package managers take care of the all dependency problems, it’ll calculate the dependencies and install those. But when it comes to downloading packages from the internet, you have to feed the urls of the package repositeries on the internet. Note that this is a very important step in ubuntu, otherwise you’ll only see a limited list of packages. Follow the guide on ubuntuguide.org. Once after you add the extra repositiries, updagrade all the libraries. Since many software depends on libraries, upgrading a one library may increase the performance of many software that you are using.

Step 3 : Install some cool software

There are thousands of cool free applications in the open source world. Just look at the applications list on add/remove programs in ubuntu. However, there are some software, such as Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Dreamweaver and there is no doubt that those are best software on those fields; and unfortunately most of those don’t have a linux version. But there is an incredible piece of software called wine which allows you to run windows applications on the linux environment. Both Photoshop and Dreamweaver works prefectly on wine. One more thing, if you are worring about the games, the answer is don’t worry :D, smile dude… most of the games works in wine but with a little of configuring.

Step 4 : Install the codecs

Since the computer became a toy to the people, the most people used it for listening songs. MP3s became so much so popular and now people are having thousands of mp3s on their hard disks. But if you tried to play a mp3 file, just after installed ubuntu, you’ll be disapointed. It can’t play mp3 files, and it also doesn’t support many other formates. The reason behind this is that most of those formates are not open source neither free, so it violates the ubuntu open source licence. But again, don’t worry, you can simply install those stuff just using one command :
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-gl gstreamer0.10-plugins-base gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse libxine-extracodecs w32codecs


Step 5 : Make it look nice

In every culture, there are some myths; so do in linux. I heard that lot of people says that linux is not user friendly and you have to do everything in that small black window, typing green letters all over here and there. But the truth is that you can do almost everything in terminal, but it’s not the only choice. You’ll see that yourself, even while when you are installing ubuntu - Just see how user friendly it is. So, however, after you logged into the system, it’s default human theme, which doesn’t look so nice to me ;). The solution is that you have to install a composite manager(beryl/compiz). If you don’t want a composite manager, you can just install someother stuffs like gdesklets, etc. Those will add some fancy effects your desktop.

That’s all about it and you are ready to go………..

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Linux, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.