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Mike Mayer68079688
Ubuntu Linux
So close to the masses but massively far 
Ubuntu Linux is one of the best opensource solutions that the world has ever seen. Itis a free and powerful operating system thatincludes, by default, most of the tools that peopleneed to get work done on a computer. What toolsit lacks have free and open source alternativesthat, in many of cases, can do equivalent orbetter work than their commercial counterparts. This particular distribution of Linux isunique in that its client version is offered as anoption, at the moment, on some HP and Dellcomputers. It is financially supported byCanonical- a company solely dedicated topromoting open source software.For the purposes of this paper I haveinstalled Ubuntu in a virtual machine. The firstscreen you are presented with when you boot thecomputer off the Ubuntu DVD is the option to“start or install” Ubuntu. This allows the new user to try Ubuntu ontheir system without risking damage to the host system’s hard disk. You can bootUbuntu up and see how it looks and feels,consider its compatibility, and if you choose,install the OS right from the live Ubuntu system. This did not work correctly in the virtual machine. This is not entirely Ubuntu’s fault but is anexample of how it does not support standard VGAdevices correctly. However, it’s true that Ubuntuwould support a wider variety of older systems.If the graphical interface has failed then you can fall back to a text-basedinstaller that has a great deal more complexity. It is not really made for everyone touse but unfortunately there are plenty of people who lack compatible hardware outthere and get forced to use the text-based installer.
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Mike Mayer68079688 This is very unfortunate that hardwaresupport is not as broad as it should be. ToUbuntu’s credit it would be difficult to support allhardware by default. Windows seems to dobetter with their installers though so it should notbe impossible.Currently Apple is the only operatingsystem manufacturer with perfect hardwaresupport. The reason behind this is that Apple willforego backwards compatibility in order to havegreat hardware support. They were the firstcompany to drop the floppy drive, the first todrop serial and parallel ports, and rumored to bethe first to drop the integrated DVD drive in alaptop. Ubuntu could not possibly have this kindof control over the hardware it must supportbecause it is designed to operate on any x86CPU. It is designed to augment or replaceWindows, which supports more hardware thanany modern OS. One of the major problems withWindows is that it is extremely slow to stop supporting legacy devices.Ubuntu has a somewhat comprehensivelist of hardware that it supports in a wiki format.https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport contains a list of specific devices that aresupported by Ubuntu and also contains a list of premade hardware that Ubuntu can support. Thisincludes specific laptops and desktops frommany major manufacturers. An interesting thingto note is that Ubuntu probably supports moreApple computers than leopard- Apple’s latestrevision of its OS.Installing Ubuntu on a virtual machine is extremely slow. Upwards of twohours in my particular case. Installing it on a system natively is very quick. You canbe up and running with Ubuntu in well under an hour. This assumes that you knowexactly how to answer every question the installer has for you and you knowprecisely what to do if something goes wrong. To an inexperienced user it could beextremely daunting because the chance of data corruption or loss is very high.
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Mike Mayer68079688When Ubuntu is first loaded you arepresented with a very beautiful login screen. Oneach login Ubuntu will check for updates to thesoftware installed.Each piece of software that is installed ona Linux system is called a package. By defaultLinux distributions try to include all the softwareneeded to perform all normal day to day tasks.On Ubuntu they do this quite well and give yousoftware to write documents, makespreadsheets, listen to music, watch DVDs,browse the internet, and check email. Ubuntu hasa system called Synaptic to install whateverpackages you may be missing. The range of software freely available with Synaptic is extremely broad. From amateur radio totools to help visualize biological macromolecules you can get a free package thatwill help you. While it has a lot of packages thereis something extremely important missing-games.Linux and games are two things that don’treally go together. This is the same story withApple computers too. Unfortunately most gamesare developed for Direct X a programminginterface that is exclusive to Windows. For Appleand Linux the games must be programmed withOpenGL. There are some major developers who develop games on OpenGL and onlya few of them provide Apple binaries and even less provides Linux binaries. Theanswer is, unfortunately, emulating the win32subsystem. This allows games to think they arerunning on Windows and can, on the fly, translateDirect X calls to OpenGL. It works ok but the bestsolution is Cedega and it’s not free.
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