Windows XP vs. Ubuntu Install

There is a knock on Linux for years that it is difficult to impossible to install. I am here to challenge that myth. I was a devoted Windows user for many years until I got sick of the high prices, viruses, spyware, OS slowdown, etc. I tried out Mandrake Linux a couple of years back and found it to somewhat difficult to use. It was OK for surfing the net and that but for not much else. It had a buggy OpenOffice 1.1 and no Firefox. I found it a huge pain to install Firefox and get Java2 SDK installed. Over time I basically stopped using it. I used to think Linux was mostly a hobbyist OS, but it has matured.

I then discovered Ubuntu. Gone were the horrific software installs, gone were figuring out dependencies, gone was the headache of getting Java up and running.

I am getting off on a tangent, so I will get back to the point of the page, installing each OS.

I will start with Windows XP and then go on to Ubuntu. The following installs were done on my desktop PC.

Installing Windows XP

I always thought installing Windows XP (XP from now on) was easy until I actually sat down and thought about it. When you actually get right down to it XP is a pain to install. Here is my take on XP installation.

I started by popping the XP CD into the drive. The computer was setup to boot from CD so I was greeted by the blue OS install screen. Remember, you cannot test drive XP first. Since I was installing it on a clean drive I could use the rudimentary fdisk to partition my hard drive. Mind you fdisk does not resize, just create partitions so if there is any existing data it will be lost.
After partitioning and formatting to NTFS I selected the new partition and began to install the OS.
The XP install asked me a few questions and then asked me for my CD key.
After about 25 minutes the computer was ready to reboot.
Once booted back into Windows I was greeted by a XP splash screen and it asked me a few questions about users. I added myself and then booted into Windows (FINALLY)!!!
First thing I noticed was the lack of anything. My PC was hooked up to my router and cable modem so I thought I would bring up IE and access the internet. I could no as there was no ethernet card found.
After investigating I saw that there were a lot of yellow exclamation points in the Device Manager next to hardware indicating that there were no suitable drivers. I need to get drivers. Luckily I had the motherboard CD. I popped in the CD and then had to determine which ethernet card I have. After looking in the case with a flashlight I determined it was a Realtek 8169 gigabit ethernet card. I then installed the corresponding driver.
After a reboot my ethernet card was working.
I then installed the motherboard chipset drivers from the CD and rebooted.
Since XP is a very insecure vulnerable OS, and the default was to make you an administrator I needed to get some anti-virus and anti-spyware installed in a big hurry.
I went to Grisoft and downloaded AVG anti-virus and anti-spyware and installed them pronto.
I then needed to install the video cards drivers. I have an Nvidia GeForce 7600GT PCI-E so I went to Nvidia website, downloaded the drivers and installed them. I needed to reboot after driver installation (a recurring theme).
So I got my ethernet card, motherboard chipset and video card working.
I have no sound so I needed to go to Creative website and download the Audigy 2 drivers. I installed them and rebooted (sigh).
I now have sound, proper video, ethernet, and proper chipset drivers.
A little yellow icon in the system tray told me I needed to update. So I clicked on it and installed the few updates I needed to. I was surprised I did not need to reboot.
After the updates were installed I was greeted again my another yellow icon in my system tray. It was downloading more updates. After it was done it said I have updates to download. Why have your updates in waves? After that XP installed about 75 updates and I got the reboot I was expecting. Why not just give me all the updates at once?
After XP rebooted I looked and there were no more yellow exclamation points in the Device Manager.
After exploring XP I came to the conclusion that there is no real software to speak of besides Internet Explorer, Outlook Express (both insecure) and a couple of rudimentary text editors.
I needed to install some software to make this PC more useful. Here are some of the programs that I use.

I had a choice of buying Office 2003 or downloading OpenOffice.org 2.2. I had a copy of Office 2003 so I installed it.

Since Internet Explorer is so insecure I needed to get a better browser. Firefox is the browser of choice. I downloaded it and installed. So I was able to now surf the web more securely.

Email client: I decided to go with Thunderbird since it is supposedly the best email client for windows and Outlook Express is pretty insecure. You can also download Evolution for Windows as well.

Next thing was to install the JRE and Java 2 SDK as I sometimes write Java applications and many sites use Java plugins. I went to SUN's website, downloaded the SDK and installed it.

The decompression (zip) program what XP comes with is lousy so I can either purchase WinZip or download 7-zip. Since WinZip has poor support for other compression formats such as .tar, .tar.gz, .bz2, rar, etc., I decided to go with 7-Zip.

I also program in C, C++ and Java from time to time and want a better text editor with syntax highlighting. Windows does not have one so I could either purchase Textpad or downloaded Notepad++ for free.

I have a way to edit C and C++ files but XP has no compiler installed. Visual studio is too expensive so I went and downloaded LCC and installed it. Finding a free C compiler is difficult for Windows. I am able to program Java applications as I already downloaded the SDK from SUN.

I want to update my webpage from time to time and the Microsoft Office I have does not have FrontPage. I went and downloaded Nvu.

I sometimes download TV shows I miss off bittorrent site. XP has no built in bittorrent client so I went and downloaded utorrent.

I also needed to be able to read .pdf files, I downloaded Foxit reader.
I want to be able to create .pdf files from any applications. To do this I needed to download PDF Creator for XP.

Since I am behind a router I have not much of a need for a firewall. Windows firewall is pretty good, but for more control download Comodo or Zone Alarm.

I want to be able to burn CDs and DVDs and the built in XP burner kind of sucks. I can get either purchase Nero or download CDBurnerXP Pro for free.

I needed to download an IM client so I went and downloaded Gaim for windows since it handles AIM, Yahoo, MSN and other popular IM protocols. If I did not use Gaim, I could have also used Trillian or downloaded each IM client software individually.
I like to edit images from time to time so I could either buy Photoshop or download The GIMP. For lighter duty image viewing I downloaded IrfanView.

After this is all done I need to make the OS more secure by giving myself limited access. To do this you need to create an Administrator account and then go into that new account and make your main account limited.
Be warned, there is a lot of crappy XP software that HAS to have administrator right to run properly. Why do games and other apps need admin rights?
Wow, for such and easy OS it sure needs a lot to get it up, running and useful. I am surprised that for $150 XP pretty much comes with very little useful software installed. I did however get excellent Google experience.
Total time to get up and running ~3 hrs

Installing Ubuntu 6.10

I have read from various websites that Linux is very hard to install and Windows is far easier. Man was I scared as Windows took about 3 hrs to get it fully going, so I guess I was in for an 8 hr job with Ubuntu. Think again.

I popped my Ubuntu CD into the drive and booted the PC from it. In about 3 mins the LiveCD was up and running a functioning OS. A bit slow since everything is run from the CD, but you do get a chance to test the OS out before you install it.
I noticed that my ethernet, sound card and chipset, all worked. The video drivers needed to be installed. I was able to surf the internet as well since the PC is hooked up to my router.
I said OK, I want to install Ubuntu but I don't want to kill my 3 hour installation of XP.
Ubuntu's installation gave me the option of wiping the entire disc, using largest free space or letting me manually edit the partitions.
I chose to manually edit the partitions and Ubuntu fired up Gnome Partition Editor. I saw that I had about a 100G NTFS partition that had nothing on it. I deleted that particular partition, clicked Apply and Ubuntu made free space.
Ok, everything seems OK. I hit the Back button and then selected the largest continuous free space option. This is actually pretty easy.
The OS prepared the hard drive and began installing Ubuntu.
I was asked the standard questions about username, password, keyboard layout, etc.
About 15 minutes later the installation was done and I was asked to reboot.
After about a minute I was greeted by a screen that asked me to enter my usename and password.
I was now logged into Ubuntu.
A notification popped up telling me that I have to update my system. I clicked the notification and there were about 147 updates to install. It took about 10 minutes to install all the updates. No reboot required!!!!!!
I followed the procedure laid out at Ubuntu Guide to install nvidia drivers for my video card. Reboot was required.
I had to edit the /etc/fstab to mount my XP NTFS partitions. XP has no support for EXT3 partitions.
Now here is the big difference, Ubuntu is loaded with cool software by default.

OpenOffice.org 2.0

Firefox 2.0 web browser

Zip file handling, along with .tar, .gz., .tar.gz, .bz2. .rar and other compression formats handled by an application called File Roller.

Evolution email.

A .pdf reader called Evince.

C and C++ through gcc.

A really nice text editor with syntax highlighting called Gedit.

The GIMP image editor installed.
Eye of Gnome to use for a slideshow.

Gaim instant messenger installed.
Totem and Rythmbox for playing music and video.
A bunch of games like solitaire, black jack, etc.

I downloaded the following through the Add/Remove (one stop shopping)

Nvu (html editor, Openoffice has an html editor, but Nvu is better IMO)

K3B (CD and DVD burning) with mp3 plugin

VLC (great media player with MP3 and MPEG1,2,4 and DiVX support buit in)

Java 1.5 SDK and 1.5 browser plugin (you also can write java applications as well after the install)

Hex editor.
gFTP (GUI ftp client)

Ktorrent (Ubuntu has built in torrent capability, but Ktorrent has better functionality)

Adobe Acrobat (Evince while functional is no match for Acrobat)
Cups-pdf for creation of PDF files through use of a printer driver.

All this took about another 15 minutes to install.
Since Ubuntu is secure out of the box I did not have to mess with super user rights, anti-virus/anti-spyware, and no firewall is needed since Ubuntu has all ports stealthed by default.
Total time to get up and running ~ 1.5 hrs

Conclusion

I thought Linux was supposed to be far more difficult to install than Windows. Well things turned out a little differently. I only had to go to one place to download all my applications that were not installed by default. I also noticed that the Ubuntu install was only 2.5GB while XP was around 6GB. I wonder why XP is so much larger but yet has very little software installed? Code bloat maybe. I thought maybe the GUI for XP far better but Ubuntu has a very nice GUI of its own.

As you can see that XP users will be downloading a lot of open source free software. I shudder to think of what you would spend if you purchased all that productivity software. Is this not the same open source software that XP people say is bad but yet will still use? Seems rather hypocritical. Windows users by far and large tout the immense abilities of all the software that XP has, but don't want to spend the money on it. They end up getting pirated copies or use the free stuff. Seriously, I do believe that Photoshop has more functionality than The Gimp. For $800 Photoshop better. Microsoft Office is a little better than Openoffice.org. For $300 it too should be.

Now mind you this was to show that Ubuntu was easier to get up and running that XP.

I will say that XP is still the king of gaming because of DirectX.

As far as mp3 ripping for XP you need media player 10 and Ubuntu needs the medibuntu codecs. Encrypted DVD playing in XP is taken care of by media player 10, Ubuntu again uses the medibuntu codecs for this task. Ubuntu plays unencrypted DVDs out of the box.

I hope that you can see that Linux is in fact easier to install than XP by a long shot. Ubuntu has far better hardware support than XP as well so more of your favorite hardware just works. I hope you enjoyed this article.

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