05 — Installation Considerations
It’s possible Kubuntu won’t run well on your hardware Then again, some computers don’t seem to run much of anything very well. If you’ve ever read or experienced a struggle to get Windows drivers for some particular computer, you are familiar with the difficulties.
With Kubuntu in particular, and Linux in general, most of the drivers you need for the system itself are already built in or easily available as add-ons. (We cover printers and other peripherals in a later chapter.) One of the major selling points for moving from Windows to Linux is that your old XP hardware is not at all obsolete. It can still support a current Linux desktop. Move up to a low-spec Vista or Win7 machine and you’ll be in Linux luxury.
We are currently in a transition period for Linux. While Linux has long offered 64-bit operations, the developers’ loving care and attention went first to server usage. Much of the user’s GUI experience still worked better in 32-bit for a while. Then again, most 64-bit consumer hardware you could buy was actually 32-bit with 64-bit extensions. It was an added capability, but not really a core function. That has changed over the years, and 64-bit is more mainstream. The way things are moving, this is probably the last release of Kubuntu where preferring the 32-bit version still makes good sense. For now, there are simply fewer problems if you run in 32-bit. And having a lot of extra RAM isn’t an issue, because Linux 32-bit has for several years come with extensions to address more than 4GB of RAM, which is the breaking point in Windows.
One of the nicest advantages to the collection of Ubuntu derivatives is the high volume of easily accessed user information. For example, this page lists the basic hardware requirements, which are the same for Kubuntu. The primary landing page for Kubuntu is here, but the generous documentation is found on this page. I highly recommend you at least review the installation sections (their chapter 6) to become familiar with what you’ll see. If you decide to look over the entire guide, you may not need this book for much. Most of what we cover here are the gotchas you’ll run into along the way, plus added guidance for the specific needs of migrating from Windows.
All software is buggy to one degree or another. For the most part, no software will ever be released as a finished product. Open Source development is particularly bad about thousands of different projects, each proceeding on its own course, many at a breakneck pace of development. New features are added, and each comes with new bugs and even some breakage. Some Linux distributors simply play along, with daily updates in one package or another. By the time you can test something and find a flaw, your report is tossed aside because it applies to something already obsolete in their minds.
End users aren’t too happy with that, because it often means cascading conflicts between two or more essential packages. Or the next release of something is so different it breaks all your settings and doesn’t work at all like it did before. The developers in their own projects often could care less about that. However, if your clients are corporate end users, it’s simply not going to work at all. So some Linux distributors run two projects in parallel. There is one group that is constantly testing newer stuff, but released in frequent increments with everything built together on the same basic system. That’s the hobbyist background, often volunteers. For their actual flagship product, they’ll take long breaks between releases and then support them for a very several years with fixes and so forth. Those releases are usually much more highly polished.
Here is the official release schedule for Ubuntu. Ubuntu with all the derivatives releases a hobby version twice each year. The version number follows the last two digits of the year; currently version 14. They predictably release in April (.04) and October (.10). However, on even years, the first release in April is given special attention as their Long Term Support release (LTS). Thus, the current LTS is 14.04. If it’s not LTS, then it’s usually “dead” within a year or so, but the LTS releases are supported for five years. When something is found to be broken or has a security vulnerability, someone in the system will rebuild that part using the original build environment and issue an update. All of the various Ubuntu-based systems get the update at the same time, and you are notified automatically.
Thus, Ubuntu and friends are considered fairly user-friendly. For this guide, you should download Kubuntu 14.04 32-bit. See this webpage for download links; it’s about 1.0 GB. Click on the big black label inside the box to see the links. You can order a DVD already burned from several different vendors online and your favorite search engine can help you.
Once you get your hands on that DVD, you can run it “live” from the disk without installing, to test whether it is compatible with your hardware. One of the first screens you see after booting from the DVD offers you the choice between installing and simply running it: “Try Kubuntu.” It will lag a bit because it has to load from the DVD into RAM, so it does not represent how fast it works once installed. However, the whole point is to get a look at it and see if it knows how to use your machine.
As a side note: If you knew how, you could use a Kubuntu DVD to mount your Windows system drive and make changes, including moving, removing and adding files, plus editing files and saving the changes. A great many alternative repair disks you can find online are simply a live-run Linux disk with special tools. Indeed, most anti-virus companies offer something like this for emergency system clean-up.
