The Story of the new Laptop

Well here i was, just finished arriving home, minding on my own business, after a stressful ride home from university,when the delivery enterprise arrived with my new laptop, a brand new Toshiba L-40, all wrapped up in a nice box.I took it out ,with the help of my cat, and turned it on, so far so good.Windows Vista and every thing,just one little problem…it came with a very very gay theme, that i couldn’t take out, my solution…recovery CD, simple, effective, and for my surprise it was fast! i thought to myself “less work for me”,but(and there is always a but, as far as my not so vast experience in the computer tech world) as soon as the windows was fully booted i noticed the never ending number of programs running on start up.

Curiosity took me to see what every application did.So i had a Toshiba infoCenter,desktopSms, a trial version of Norton(that not even was enabled),and a few more things that i don’t recall right now.So i got my self busy preparing my new, fresh out of the box, laptop.Started out by running msconfig and unchecking those programs, that i didn’t like to see that much, on the startup.Next went to the program manager and uninstall Norton and every thing else that i didn’t like. Ok so i got myself a Windows Vista ready for my activities.

But why stick only with one O.S. when u can have two!! Fetched my ubuntu 7.10 distro slipped it on the dvd-rom tray and rebooted the laptop.

A new installation started…so i thoughted.To my surprise it did not start installation has it was supposed to.It was a LiveCd, which it is great, always useful when a person is in a tight situation, but it was not the case, at the moment i needed an installer.So i started thinking ” i was sure i selected the Start & install option in the start menu of the cd”… and i did! there it was right in front of me this big icon saying INSTALL i putted two and two together, and there it was the O.S. install interface.

Pretty simple it was, just select the language, the keyboard layout, the partion(even has automatic option, but i prefer manual), ok on the partition department i like to divide my disk in 3 parts (/home,/ and swap) and the type of partition “ext3″(dunno why i choose this one maybe cause its always the first one on the list,need to investigate this).With the partition business done, off to the account config, full name just for info on the system(don’t need this but i like to be picky sometimes), account name! ok here i always choose a small name in lowercase mode, this way its easy and fast to type(here i am picky mode again), next password…no need to tell every that it should be alphanumeric(numbers and letters), more than 6 digits and don’t forget to put it in upper and lower case(can’t be safe enough =P).

Account department done, finally installation starts.Now i have Windows vista and ubuntu 7.10 with a grub loader to choose which one i want to load.Happy?! well no i still need eclipse and java to be able to do some work at my university. Ok so i go console mode, start up by making a backup of my source list (found in /etc/apt/source.list) and changing it by putting the repositories easily found on ubuntuguide.org.

Now for the best part, i have to install packages in Linux, ohhh noo it sooo hardd, i can’t do it =( probably thats what you are thinking right now, well my friend you are wrong, nothing more simple actually, just do sudo apt-get install “program”,et voila, and it does everything for you.Easier then putting pre-cooked meals on the microwave.after a few of this and i got myself a laptop ready to do some programing.

Ok so you don’t feel that much at ease with the console, no piggy the dudes from ubuntu thought about that, just use the synaptic package manager(use the menu system->administration->synaptic package manager)this is a graphic interface that does the same as apt-get and a little more. After all this i finally was happy with what i got,for now at least.Lets see how long will take me to blow up this two O.S.(my record time was 48hours with windows xp =x).

-I finish this Post with a nice picture of the Toshiba L-40 with his very interesting original theme.

Toshiba L-4o with not so good theme

ps-Forgot to mention, but i got this laptotp trough a deal from the local school, therefore the theme…

One thought on “The Story of the new Laptop”

  1. Well done Cunha. Thank for share with us your experience with both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu).

    I’m starting to explore more deeper Linux and Ubuntu sounds great. However I’ll start with Fedora 7 then I may try different SO’s.

    About Windows and pre-installed SO’s, well..it’s always the same… I think Microsoft did a great job with Windows and I use it as my primary SO but it isn’t the best in the market.

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