YWAM Information Technology

On Monday we were having a Skype conference for the YWAM KB and Steve needed to reboot his Vista Laptop... (of course) Anyway it was a frustrating wait for the rest of us let alone Steve. Now I have been suggesting he installs Linux on his machine and regains the speed and productivity he seems to be lacking these days. Yet that is a big jump.

I have been playing with http://www.virtualbox.org/ which is a virtual machine. It makes it childsplay to try out a new Operating System before you get down to re-formatting hard drives and such scary things.

So why not try out Linux. I recommend downloading the latest Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com) or Kubuntu (http://www.kubuntu.org- my favourite) version. You want the Desktop edition (not Server or Alternate install). Start up Virtualbox and make a new machine (A linux 2.6 machine with sound - about 300 Mb ram.) Make a virtual hard disk of max 5Gb size (it will grow up to this).

You can burn the disk image to a CD or just connect the file to the virtual box as a CDROM image.

Fire up the virtualbox and it will boot from the virtual CD (press F12 if it doesn't boot from the virtual CD) and press the RIGHT CONTROL key to get out of the virtual machine. Have a lot of fun!

I would suggest that if you feel your experience is positive then boot your computer from the CD rom and test all your important hardware works (wifi can be tricky as can video cards). Then have a trial install back in your virtual machine. Once you get the hang of it you could try it for real! BUT BACKUP EVERYTHING FIRST! YOU COULD LOOSE EVERYTHING IF YOU ARE NOT CAREFUL. Actually, I got another machine that I broke repeatedly and learnt a lot from.

Anyway what are you waiting for? Go and have a lot of fun! If you fancy trying a BSD then the very same process applies but it is much more technical.

Kevin