[Wiltshire] Installing Ubuntu

[David Fletcher]

On Wed, 2014-04-02 at 17:41 +0100, Mike Lennard wrote:
> I am installing Ubuntu on a Dell Latitude laptop, loaded with Windows
> XP. I have bought a bundle from the Linux Shop, which consists of:
> 
> ·         PCLinuxOS 2013.12
> 
> ·         OpenSuse 13.1
> 
> ·         Linux Mint 16 Mate DVD
> 
> ·         Simply MEPIS 11.0
> 
> ·         Ubuntu  13.10
> 
>  
> 
> I am probably being thick but what are they all for and is there a
> sequence to installing them?

You only need one. My preference at the moment is Mint with Mate
desktop. Others will no doubt disagree.

Personally, I'll be waiting until the next Long Term Support version is
released before I do any fresh installations. At the moment I'm running
Mint 13 on the net book and would probably recommend that if you don't
want to wait. The trouble with non-LTS versions is that their support
period is very short. Mint 13 is still supported until April 2017.

Whatever Linux version you choose you definitely need to get rid of XP.
I'd go for Mint 13. Sorry, I wish you'd asked here before you bought the
distribution media. Somebody here would have done it for you for
nothing.

For a friend who I did this for with an Acer laptop, I took out the
rather small hard drive and replaced it with a new 500GB drive and
installed Mint 13 64 bit with Mate desktop. She's really pleased and the
laptop runs better than it ever did. I gave her a SATA to USB cable for
pulling files off the old hard drive.

Dave