Comments on: A home user’s successful migration strategy from Windows to Ubuntu

By: Ted

Ted — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:07:27 +0000

Probably not. I’ve converted my parents, my father-in-law, my best friend, I’m in the process of converting my brother & his wife, and have gotten interest from my wife’s best friend…

There’s a common thread tying all of them together: They’ve all either had to deal with being “botted” or having their Windows machines grind to halt from malware infestations. And they don’t want to change their surfing habits or have a repeat.

Ubuntu + Wine + VirtualBox and “no surfing the net in Windows, use Linux instead” seems to tip people over to taking a look at it. Knowing that they don’t have to “jump into the deep end” of switching to a strange OS all at once is, understandably, very important to most people.

Having a migration path that lets them “retreat” to Windows as they need seems to be the key thing to making the change. Fear of Windows malware seems to be a powerful motivator to start. Once over that hump, Ubuntu then seems to simply sell itself…

By: Jeff T.

Jeff T. — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:21:29 +0000

i began my ubuntu experience with the release of 8.04. i was 15 years old and had no idea what i was doing. I jumped right into it. Went from no Linux experience to solely an Ubuntu user. and I’m still a user today. I plan to be one tomorrow and the day after. i’ve converted four friends over to Ubuntu and they have been going for about 8 months now and my phone has stopped ringing as much. coincidence?

By: Lonesome Bob

Lonesome Bob — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:14:46 +0000

Well, well, well. I’m a newbie to Ubie, too; just having installed it on my oldie but goodie Dell Optiplex GX1 (PIII, 498 RAM, 10GB Hdd, etc.) So far, she runs like a charm–can’t wait to dig in and find out more…I’m getting to like this open source idea. Today I burned Kubuntu to CD and will swap WinXP for KDE soon as it no longer boots on my Gateway E3400 (BSOD). Let’s just dive right in and do it, shall we? Nothing like giving old equipt a new lease on life!

By: aaronmcnees

aaronmcnees — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:30:19 +0000

thank you very much for all this. i’m just getting started and have had to hunt around for which version of wubi is best for my machine, i like 8.04 for speed and functionality, the 9.04 version was almost unusably slow, while the 7 feisty version was amazingly fast, but could not get it to install new stuff.
hardy heron works really well for my 2.4 gz 256 mbram dell desktop.
i’ve installed an old hardrive as a slave and will try setting up ubuntu 8.04 on it and see where it goes from there. i’m still not sure how this will boot but i’ll read your guide.
thanks a whole lot.
aaronmcnees

By: Annina Bruno

Annina Bruno — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:52:00 +0000

… and please be ready to enjoy yourself :-)… in, say, half the time you spend battling viruses, worms, botnets and so on!

By: Mike Klein

Mike Klein — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 06:37:51 +0000

Thank you UbunuCat for the above article and allowing the posts. I gained a lot of insight, both into myself and reading the experiences of others. Now, would I classify myself as a “dive right in” type of person? I would state that I am somewhere in between the two extremes…and right now am taking a slower approach. I originally started in 1998 with a W98 and AMDK6 350 mhz motherboard and went through all the problems the persons listed above have posted. I have burned up mother boards and media devices and struggled with drivers etc. I finally gave up for a few years–about 6– and then friends and family gave me their old systems. Currently running WME with 800 mhz on the desktop and have a second system with Pentium lll 500 mhz I am loading with WinXP-HE and Ubuntu (v.?). With all the problems I have had with Microsoft products I am more enthused about loading LINUX OS…but also need some old Windows apps to work…so I will go the dual boot option.

Now, I am not going to be mad at Microsoft because… they are a good business BUT,…I personally do not like Bill Gates and his personality. Second, Microsoft has not really engineered anything really “brilliant” outside of a good business plan. And that plan is to “buy out or bury” his competition in addition to extracitng as much “cash” from the market place as he can. Starting with the browser wars with Netscape …then all the suspicious malware around on the internet it does make one apprehensive about adopting an open source OS.

So this week I begin…not sure if I am using Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron or some version of Kubuntu because the latter is better on older sytems with 128 RAM. Wish me luck and if any suggestions please post or email me at http://www.mk6814@hotmail.com. Thanks all…I feel like I aleady know many of you! Best wishes! -Mike

By: Ketul Savla

Ketul Savla — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:06:57 +0000

Thanks for this detailed information.. I always wanted to try new things. This will really help me in getting on with ubuntu.

Thanks a lot.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:56:25 +0000

I just installed Ubuntu 2 days ago on my laptop (didnt mess with my desktop, Windows 7). My reason for diving right in is very simple, Knowledge! I mastered DOS by diving right in, i mastered all the versions of windows by diving right in, I mastered the mac O.S. by diving right in, I mastered a few programming languages by diving right in, I have learned a great deal about computers in general by diving right in. So far it is a pleasant experience I really kind of like how easy it is to screw with the command line and the general programming of the O.S. itself. Lets face it there are only so many time you can break windows on purpose just to find out how to fix it without discovering the solution is the same as one you used before. So I will learn this O.S. and break it a few times who knows it might become my favorite

By: schak

schak — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:43:38 +0000

I, too, was a dive-right-in switch a couple months ago. After moving back to the US from Europe about a year ago, my PC was severely damaged by the movers, which necessitated a complete rebuild. Unfortunately, my XP disk was in a separate shipment and, as a die hard geek – gamer and hobby 3D animator – I can’t be without a computer. So I “upgraded” to Vista. After nearly a year of constant hardware and software issues and wondering why I was missing a GB of RAM that apparently Windows had some secret agenda for, I made the switch after doing a minimal amount of research. I’ve bounced back and forth between Ubuntu 9.10 and openSUSE 11.1 and 11.2, and have finally settled on Ubuntu. I really wish I’d made the switch sooner, but as a gamer, didn’t think any Linux distro would ever suit my needs. There are not words in the English language to describe how happy I am to have been wrong. Almost every Windows game I have works, and I actually get *better* perfomance in World of Warcraft in Ubuntu than I could ever have hoped to in Windows.
I still have the Windows partition, but it’s only there if I have to bring work home with me.

By: 123

123 — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:10:54 +0000

reading the last bunch of comments…
have since installed and played a bit with a couple distros on older pcs.
unetbootin is nice installer. i recommend torrenting any iso that looks good then pointing unetbootin to the iso.