Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Work Life: Ubuntu - First Impression

I finally got around to installing Ubuntu. I have never really used Linux although I did have some exposure over a decade ago. Unfortunately, I installed the server version so there was absolutely nothing there except for the terminal. The only command that I knew how to use was [ls] which just provides me the list of directories and files.

A friend then work his magic while I tried to follow what he was doing. Eventually ended up with a gui interface (I think it was called X Windows) with nothing there. He then just recommended to use the GUI version of Ubuntu.

Since he's out, I tried to play around with the flash drive and found that I could run Ubuntu right off the drive. This was much easier to use with the interface. It is much easier to navigate directories and open files which are very similar to Windows. I was able to open Firefox and watch YouTube videos on Linux tutorials.

I started by searching for how to install files from Ubuntu although I kind of figured how to do so in the terminal. From the GUI, I would just get a folder-like directory when I clicked on the files that I downloaded. I also did not know what the difference was between YUM and RPM. So... I have much to learn.

One minor thing that I have to get used to is that the icons to close, minimum, maximize, etc. are on the top left corner. Also what takes me a while to adjust is that the icons do not appear in max size unless the mouse hovers in the upper regions of the screen. This seems to throw me off for some reason.

In conclusion, I was not able to do much with my working knowledge of Windows except to navigate the directories and configure the wireless. My goal was try to get to installing a web server and database, so there may be other basic functions that I could figure out for regular use.

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