How to convert from Windows to Linux

I could give you a full and complete guide to doing so—but it would be a novelette, and not very practical for the new user. The best thing to have when converting is a good attitude and a willingness to learn. This is a bare-bones guide—for a more complete one, search the forums.

eZine lover (@eZine)

Published in

Full Circle Magazine

· 1 year ago

Written by Todd Millecam

The first thing you will need to know is how to get the software you want on your computer. Believe it or not, it's easier to do this in Ubuntu than it was in Windows. Simply click Add/Remove in the Applications menu, and then search for the kind of program you're looking for. Click the check box next to the program, click "OK", and you should be good to go.

If you can't find a program in add/remove, try adding a repository which has it (a repository is an online database of software — Add/Remove generates its list from the repositories)

Second — dealing with application hangs and freezing. In Windows there was Ctrl-Alt-Delete for all your freezing needs. In Ubuntu, you have a bit more available to you. You can restart your session by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Backspace — which is highly effective in every case I've encountered. If you don't feel like dropping everything just because one application froze, you may want to right click on one of your panels and add two programs there: System Monitor and Force Quit. Force Quit will kill whatever application window you click on, and System Monitor will give you a list of processes. Of course, you have to be mindful of compatibility if an application keeps hanging. Software made for Edgy won't work very well in Gutsy. You can check your system version in system monitor (far left tab), and you can usually check the version of the software before you download, or under the "Help" menu on the "About" option.

There are some things that are just plain different, that you'll need to get used to. The most notable of these are workspaces. Linux gives you four desktops in one — just to help keep things organized. You can switch between them by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Right arrow (left arrow also works), or by clicking on the gray boxes in the bottom right.

If organization is your thing you might also want to consider a "home partition." This is an area of space that you set aside on your hard drive that both Windows and Ubuntu can read (you can format this partition in FAT32, NTFS or ext2, but with NTFS, you may need a configuration tool for Linux, and with ext2, you'll need a plugin for Windows). If you want to be able to view certain files from both operating systems (like pictures, movies, etc.), this is a wonderful idea to implement when you install Ubuntu.

To make it more accessible in Linux, you may want to change your ~/home folder to point to that drive. You can do this by clicking on System > Administration > Users and Groups. Find your profile, click properties, click the advanced tab, and change the location of your home directory.

Now, you're probably used to directories named "Windows" and "Program Files." In Linux, these are all over. Configuration files are usually under /etc. More important executables are under /bin, while the less important are under /usr/bin. /lib contains a bunch of libraries (similar to .dll files in Windows, but they work in a fundamentally different way), and /media will give you a list of all the drives you can access. There's more, but that should give you a basic idea of how it works.

Ubuntu will keep all these organized very neatly if you stick with repositories and Add/Remove. In general though, you're going to want to keep all movies, pictures, and other media in your home directory, and just make additional directories to help organize them.

Last off — to help keep things nice and neat you're going to want shortcuts. For a program, it's called a launcher and you just have to know the exact name of the program to make one (example, the Terminal program is actually called gnome-terminal in some distributions).

To make a link to a directory, run the terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type: