The Linux Diet (Part 1)

Allow me to help you leave the Microsoft world by following my Linux diet. The first thing you want to do, is make up your mind to make the full-time switch to Linux. Make sure to make a final backup of all the things you want to keep. Burn it a Disk or USB drive and take all your Microsoft Software and put the backup and the Software in a Box, seal it and throw it in your closet.

Download, and pop in a Copy of Xubuntu and reboot, making sure you have your BIOS set to boot to the device you are installing Xubuntu to and make sure Secure Boot is OFF. I highly recommend version 12.04 LTS of Xubuntu. Go though the install process until it asks you how you want to partition the drive and tell it you want to use ALL of the drive, no dual booting, it’s highly important.

Dual booting is a no-no due to hooks Microsoft has to pull you back to dirty Windows, the same tactics Cigarette makers use to get you to smoke just one more. Now that you have Xubuntu installed, on first boot you will need to install a few hundred MBs of Updates and Reboot.

You are going to see something similar to Mac, you probably don’t like this, neither did I. So let’s change it. Right click the bottom Panel and select Panel Preferences. You can delete this Panel by clicking the remove Icon next to the ‘+’. Go to Panel Preferences for the top Panel and Unlock it, then drag it down to the bottom, lock it again.

In the post below I show you how to change a few other things. If you would like a Quick Launch we can add one manually, the built in one sucks. Go to Panel>Panel Preferences and click the Tab called Items. Here there are things you can remove, when you click ‘+’ there are many things you can add. I’m hoping you are smart enough to figure most of this out, so I will tell you the basics.

After the Applications menu you will have a Separator, followed by 6 Launchers and another Separator. For mine, after that last Separator, I have Window Buttons, Network Monitor, Separator, Notification Area, Weather Update, Separator and Date and Time. Right click each blank Launcher and click the ‘+’ where you can search or browse through for Apps to add.

Here are some tips: If you don’t like your monitor going blank and powering off, In the Apps menu go to Settings and Settings manager and click Screensaver. Click the Advanced tab and unselect Power Management.

Go back and click Session and Startup, in the Application Startup tab uncheck ‘Network’. This is useless if you have an always on Ethernet connection. And the Network Monitor I showed you before is better for this and has Flashing Lights.

Back in the Settings, click Power Manager, Under ‘On AC’ you can put all the sliders on ‘Never’ if you dislike things powering off automatically. Of course, this is all how I like mine, feel free to adjust things the way you want them. And never install ‘Nautilus’ in Xubuntu, it can cause stability issues.

Your File Manager is called Thunar, Thunar has an issue where on 1st open it will take a VERY long time to start. Here is the Resolution for this:

“Edit the file /usr/share/gvfs/mounts/network.mount (as root) and change AutoMount to false. This disables the Network browsing when Thunar starts up, but still lets you mount network storage such as Samba shares on demand.” That will take care of your problem.

Ipconfig in Linux is ‘ifconfig’. CTRL+C will end a command in the Terminal window, Like a never-ending Ping request. In the Terminal, ‘free -m’ will show your free memory (-/+ buffers/cache under 'free'). And ‘df’ in the Terminal will show Hard Drive info.

This concludes this part of Me, helping You move away from a truly evil company. So, welcome to the Linux Club. The first rule of the Linux Club is; you don’t talk about Microsoft!.