ubuntu as main os for college?

I am beginning college next yrear and am waiting for my new t61 to come. I bought a 160 gb hd and plan on running vista ultimate 64 bit and ubuntu.

I just started using linux a couple of weeks ago and love it. I would like to use linux as my main os for college. Will I run into any problems?

Can I adjust my partition later if I need more space for linux or vista?

I have a 160 gb external as well, will I be able to use it with both os's fine?

 

Your university will likely not be able to support you with Linux, so you will be on your own for that. It wouldn't be a good idea to completely remove Windows. There may also be Windows-specific applications that your college will require. It really depends. Adjusting partitions is possible, but can be difficult, so I'd recommend leaving at least 20-40GB for Windows. Feel free to try, but just realize that it may take a little sacrifice and work to use it on your network. Try hooking up with a local LUG (Linux User's Group) on campus that may make things easier for you.

 

This is one thing that I have been looking into as well. I'm going to the University of Minnesota and have e-mailed the tech support people working there for information on this very subject. They basically said it would be fine, except for the fact that I won't be able to connect to the U of M's internet! I guess you have to be running a custom version of Norton Antivirus even to connect to the network! I find this to be quite ridiculous for many reasons, but there isn't much I can do about it.

So I would say you call up or e-mail your college and ask. It definitely was worth it in my case.

Also, your external should work fine as long as it's formatted as FAT32 or similar.

 

well he could jsut get ntfs-3g and ntfs-3g tools i think its called and then he can write to ntfs

 

It depends on what your major is and what software they require you to use. For my major (Computer Science) I would have had no problems using Linux as a primary. (Except for one class where the software required windows to run, but I used the lab at school anyways). There is a good chance you'll need windows for something so either run it in a virtual machine in linux or keep it installed and dual boot.

 

format that spare drive as ext3 and then just install the ext3 driver in windows. it will work fine. stay away from crummy fat32 partitions.

 

if you are not major in computer science, I would say why bother. Times can be spent on something else rather than tweaking linux, unless you treat it as a hobby.

And I would rather recommend running linux under windows in a VM, as you still can get 95% of the benefit of linux but not its deficiency in device support, iffy power management(improved a lot though). Unless of course you want to play with the 3D UI thing, which again back to the "hobby" trail.

 

as im doing physics, linux is a no no for me..the provided openoffice exell alternative doesnt even do error bars on graphs....no thats a major let down for me. ofcourse you can argue by saying use wine to install exell...but why bother. just get yourself a copy of windows

 

One of the foremost authorities on Sanskrit, a man who is by no means a computer science major, happens to run Linux as his primary OS. I can't give myself as an example because although I'm in religious studies now, my undergrad major was computer engineering. Even in religious studies, I am much more productive using Linux than I would ever be using Windows.

I agree that spending time tweaking Linux should be avoided but that can be achieved by sticking with a distribution like Ubuntu. It is very user friendly. It receives major updates at a reasonable pace (every 6 months). It has a large user community which helps when there is a problem. (Just google for the problem.)

 

yeh I am deffinately keeping windows since I have a free copy of vista ultimate.

I am thinking of partition like 60 gb of my 160 gb hd for luinux and the rest for windows. If I wanted to delete linux would my windows os recognize that and make my availible hd space bigger?

As a pharmacy major I cant see there being too mnay problems right away with running linux.

 

Remember that some student software is available natively on Linux. Mathmatica, for example. OpenOffice will give you document compatibility above and beyond what any college students needs, Plus, there's always VMware for any custom applications you might need to run.

My guess is that word processing, email, and web are the three most-used apps for any college student, (particularly a freshman undergrad). And Linux does quite well at all three.

As others have said, if you're dual-booting, skip the fat32 stuff and get the ext3 driver for Windows.

I ran redhat as my only OS in college. And that was in 1997.

 

I am a college student.

I run Linux as my primary OS, heck my ONLY OS.

 

I AM a comp sci major, but, the reasons I run Linux are NOT related to that at all. I prefer Linux because of:
1) Less bloatware (no need to worry about antivirus, etc.)
2) Free (without pirating software)
3) System doesn't degrade over time
4) I like tinkering (hobby), and I can script out menial tasks

I use it as my primary OS on both my desktop and laptop. I do however think it's necessary to be able to use Windows (VM or dual boot) from time-to-time. I do it as little as possible, but I have run into situations where it has to be done, well, one at least. Technically, I could've gotten around that one situation, but it would've been more trouble than it was worth.

Basically, I had to run some Java applets on CD for one of my classes, now, you'd think, Java, cross-platform, no problem. Well, it was a problem, because all the code referred to the applet filenames with mixed casing, whereas the filenames on the CD were all lowercase. Since Windows is case insensitive, no problems there, but any non-Windows system (including Macs) wouldn't be able to run those applets without copying them to disk and manually renaming them to match the code. You would also need to run the applets in the terminal so you could get the error output to see what the proper filename would be.

So, like I said, Linux as a primary OS? I highly recommend it, but just make sure you have access to Windows when necessary. Myself, I may just use a friend's computer or a computer in the computer lab in the future if necessary.

 

I'm an Economics major (nearly done now) and I've been using Kubuntu since it's initial release without any issues. Very rarely I come across Office documents I can't really use with OpenOffice but there's usually someone nearby who can make a PDF for me and I have KVM based windows installation (as well as a dual boot setup I never use .

My recommendation: put some time into learning Latex, as it will make you a lot more productive than messing with either Word or Excel for papers (but check if you have to hand in assignments as .doc, first, there's a few places braindead like that).

 

Don't get me wrong, I've used LaTeX since the early 90s and I'm not dreaming of switching to anything else. There's one caveat however. As long as you are fine with the styles provided and fine with the customization they allow, you're good to go. If you are aiming at some customization that the styles provided were not designed for, things can get very complicated very quickly.

Regarding assignments in .doc, sometimes the reason is that teachers want to be able to put comments directly into the file instead of printing out. My strategy when I see teacher asking for Word documents is to ask the reason and see if I can accommodate it with LaTeX. For instance, for those teachers who want Word documents because they want to be able to put comments in the file, I ask if it is okay to give them a PDF with the commenting feature turned on. I have not yet have one teacher tell me that I could not do that. As far as they're concerned, it just means using Acrobat Reader which is freely available. The free Acrobat Reader is able to edit comments besides just viewing a file. There's a catch, however. You need to be able to produce a PDF that can take comments because by default they don't take comments. I've looked left and right for an Open Source solution that would do it but was not able to find one. (If anybody knows an actual solution for this, let me know.) The only solution I'm aware of is to use Adobe Acrobat Professional. That's the problem. Either you need to buy it ($$$$) or you need to find a place where you can use it and it is available only for closed-source OSes. You need to open your PDF with the software, select the menu item that turns commenting on and save the file.

 

A little OT but I had a teacher in grad school that actually required us to write up the answers to the problem sets in LaTeX ...