Desktop Effects

You can enable Desktop Effects by pressing Alt+F2 and then by typing, "desktop-effects". Click Run. A windows then comes up. Then click Enable Desktop Effects.

Dual booting Windows and Ubuntu

I installed Ubuntu on my dad's computer and now I'm loving it! I kept Windows XP on there by partitioning the hard drive ( My hard drive can hold 80GBs of space. ). I will provide a tutorial on how to install Ubuntu and keep Windows so you can run most programs from the Internet like War Rock! To begin, make sure you already have Windows, and only Windows, installed on your system.

The first step is to download Ubuntu and burn the ISO image to a disc like a CD.
To get Ubuntu, visit the Ubuntu web site's download page and select the features. Make sure you select the Desktop version, not the server version. The server version is boring as hell! Choose a mirror closest to where you are for faster downloads. Then click Download! It's recommended to save this humongous file to your desktop. After a long 700MB download (about that), you will then have to burn that to a CD. If you want to insure that this file was not damaged, see HowToMD5SUM and scroll down to MD5SUM on Windows. I am going to skip checking the file since you're most likely smart enough to read the HOWTOs, and most of the time, there is no error. I didn't check it myself. Now you should download and install Infra Recorder, a free and open source image burning program for Windows. Now, insert a blank CD in the drive and select Do Nothing or Cancel if an autorum dialog pops up in Windows. Open Infra Recorder, and select the 'Actions' menu, then 'Burn image'. Select the Ubuntu CD image file you just downloaded (it should be on your desktop), then click 'Open'. In the dialog, click 'OK'. And wait... Done!

The next step is to boot from the CD.
To boot from the computer simply place the Ubuntu CD into the CD-ROM drive, reboot the computer, and the computer should detect the bootable CD and boot from the disc. If the computer is loading to an error message when attempting to boot to the CD or loads into Windows, you may be encountering any of the below situations.

• Need to press a key to boot to CD
  

  Later bootable CD's such as the Microsoft Windows XP CD will actually prompt a user to press a key to boot from the CD. If no key is pressed then the computer will continue to boot normal and not load the CD. Make sure to pay close attention to the screen as the computer is starting and press a key if prompted. I had to press F12 (or delete, or F10, or F92377, etc...) as quick as possible to access the Boot Menu. If you do not see anything that says boot menu, read your computer manual about booting from CDs. If you lost it, Google for it! Like, "dell optiplex gx240 manual"
  



• Bad CD Disk
  

  Verify either in the computer you are using or another computer that the CD is readable. It's possible that the CD is bad or not readable. If you determine the CD is getting errors when being read, try first cleaning the CD before looking for a replacement. Additional information about how to clean your CD disc and CD-ROM drive can be found here.



• If none of the above worked, visit this page that I got some of the information from. If it did, yay!

Starting the Ubuntu Live CD
When Ubuntu boots from the CD, you should see something that resembles this (7.04 Feisty Fawn is what I had, will be outdated by October 2007):


You want to Start or Install Ubuntu.

The system boots and starts a desktop that is run entirely in the RAM of your system (the Ubuntu installation CD is also a Live-CD) without changing anything on your hard disk. This has the advantage that you can test how Ubuntu works on your hardware before you finally install it.



After the Live-CD desktop has started, double-click the Install icon on the desktop to start the installation to the hard drive (or you can play around with Ubuntu but it will be not as fast as when it is installed.):



The installer starts. First, select your language:



Then choose your time zone:



Change the keyboard layout, if necessary:



Now, for some crazy reason, you DON'T want Windows, just Ubuntu when you start your computer, visit this link and follow the tutorial from this point. If the link is outdated, Google it. Then, just email me. My email is at the bottom of this post.

Now, here comes the tricky part. Well, it isn't tricky, only tricky for me to explain. You sould see two options now. Guided and Manual. Of course, you're going to have to choose Manual, since Guided formats the entire disk and kicks Windows out of the system -- forever! When you select Manual, then Next, you will start to partition your hard drive with the Gnome Partition Editor. Let's first start by figuring out how much memory you have. If you don't know how to find out, Google it. If you have between 2GB and 4GB and beyond, you don't really need a Linux Swap drive, your virtual memory. If not, you need a swap partition that is recommended to be twice your memory size.

Wow! This is too much! I give up! Just email me for more info.


If you have any questions, you can comment this post, or if you don't want to wait as long, you can email me:

eboyjr AT gmail DOT com