Beginning Ubuntu Linux Book Review

Intro - This is episode 9 for the week of Sept 17 to Sept 23 2006.

Welcome - Hello and welcome back, thank you for joining me this week. I have a book review that you may find informative. on this weeks podcast. The book is called Beginning Ubuntu Linux by Keir Thomas and published by Apress. Enjoy!

Yes, I know. I inadvertently called WINE a Windows emulator. Which it is not. It is an application compatibility layer! W.I.N.E. = WINE Is Not an Emulator. A thousand apologies to the maintainers of WINE.

For those of you who are new, this podcast is dedicated to helping new users get comfortable with Ubuntu and Linux in general as well as give information to potential users in order to help them get over their fears of switching to a new operating system.


News
1. Killing the 5 Myths against Linux - http://www.reallylinux.com/docs/myths.html

Myth #1 - Linux is hard to install Especially if I am not sure I want to keep it, but just try it out. Of course not true, Ubuntu is very easy to install take some of us less than 20 minutes. Also, many of the Linux distro's have a live cd where you can try before you write anything to your hard drive.

Myth #2 - Linux is free and therefore unsupported. If you have been on the forums you understand that there is a huge amount of information. From "how to's", support from Linux veterans, and general information. All provided for the end user free of charge. Canonical also offers professional service plans mainly for the business to business market. As a side note, when I installed ubuntu on my laptop, my main source for technical support were ubuntu forums and Google.

Myth # 3 - Linux is for techies and does not have an interface like windows. I could see where this is true. My only brush with linux was at a college and back then it was the old DOS style text interface that ran batch files to run programs. But Linux users have had excellent GUI's for years and they rival both Windows and OSX interfaces. Here is just a few examples of the many options that are available to linux users: Gnome, KDE, Xfce, Enlightment, Fluxbox. There are I'm told many more.

Myth #4 - There is not much software developed for Linux available. Possible. In terms of sheer magnitude maybe, but in terms of quality, is up for argument. I agree that the gold standards are MSOffice and Adobe Photoshop. And there may be other pieces of software that you just can't live without. For instance, I use Quicken for my personal finances, musicians might use Audition for tracking, and web designers might use Dreamweaver. But all is not lost...see the next Myth!

Myth #5 - I have to give up all my windows software. No yet! WINE, which is a "compatibilty layer" for Linux will allow certain Windows programs to run in a Linux environment. I hear that Cedega and Crossover are also options that allow Windows programs to run under Linux although for a fee. I haven't given this a try yet but I think I may do this for a future podcast. Hmmm...

2. Ubuntu live cd with Flash 9 that works!!! Here is the Link.
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2006/09/customizing_ubuntu_live_cd_606_1.html

3. Free Linux and UNIX books - http://freecomputerbooks.com/unixBooksIndex.html

4. Edgy eft is coming soon here is some looks at the GUI and a link to the site on ubuntu.com devoted to edgy - http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/knot3?highlight=%28edgy%29%7C%28eft%29