The Bellingham Technical College in Washington is hosting "Linuxfest" tomorrow. I've had a ton of troubles with 8.04 and am using 7.10 for the time being. Considering it's an LTS, it has a
lot of bugs. We've had a lot of trouble with dual monitor support on a newish Radeon card.
Edit: 7.10 even gave the guys at the Ubuntu booth trouble. We did it before somehow, but we're not sure how. We'll be giving 8.04 another shot soon.
I am by no means an expert, but I'll try to answer some general Linux questions.
Ubuntu (as well as many other distros) comes with a "Desktop" and a "Server" version. This is different than Microsoft Windows XP/Vista versus Server 2000/2003. The "Server" version is by no means "Faster" or "More feature rich". The "Server" version has many things ripped out (such as the GUI (aka: "Desktop"), for example). Instead, you are left with a somewhat barebone Linux install (Ubuntu style). This is designed to allow you to install only what you need to run so that nothing extra is running in the background causing possible security or performance problems.
An Ubuntu Alternate CD, I believe, is usually just a version of the Ubuntu installer that doesn't use the GUI based installer. If you're having troubles installing Ubuntu with the normal CD, you can use the Alternate CD to use a text-based installer.
For those of you wondering what Kubuntu is, I must go on a short lesson. You have two (popular) options for what we in the Linux world call a "display manager" (aka: the "desktop"). The two (popular) options are Gnome and KDE. Gnome is arguably somewhat more popular than KDE and is probably what you'd most often see on most Debian based distros (Ubuntu being one of them).
Kubuntu is Ubuntu, but with KDE as the default display manager. If you like KDE, then you will like Kubuntu.
As Linux is a different operating system, you can not run Windows applications on it
unless you use a third-party Windows emulator such as, for example, the very popular program WINE. With a third-party Windows emulator, you can run
most Windows applications. Don't expect to be able to load up Call of Duty 4 and have it work flawlessly out of the box. As with much you will do in Linux, it will take a fair bit of tweaking to get working. The amount of tweaking you must do depends on what it is you're trying to run. Something simple like the Windows Calculator will most likely work instantly where as something complicated like Crysis would most likely take tons and tons of tweaking as well as a very good patience and heaps of knowledge (of both WINE and Crysis' game engine).
(Update!: A system builder at Linuxfest claims that World of Warcraft runs near perfect (perfect as far as I could tell when I tried it) on a WINE install with no tweaks or settings whatsoever. I was impressed.)
There are, however, Linux games. Being Open Source does not mean they suck.
Linux is "Open Source", meaning that source codes (and their binaries, if compiled) is available to the public free of charge. The distros that "cost money" are usually selling
support for the product and not the product itself (although sometimes you pay for non-GPL software). Red-Hat Linux, for example. Red-Hat Linux is completely free, as are all other distros, but you may purchase optional support if you so choose.
For everyone who wants to start learning about Linux and it's common distros, I
highly recommend getting (at the very least) a book to study from or, better yet, a class at your local college. You might be able to get by with just Google and searching forums, but it might not be as easy.
For those of you who can get a distro of Linux successfully installed (and configured) on your computer, don't be surprised if you "forget" about Windows for a while.
Check us out live at
www.linuxfestnorthwest.org!
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