ITE221 - Fall 2011 - Chapter 2

            For this week’s website review, I decided to look at an alternate operating system, something other than one of the “Big Two” for PCs (the “Big Two” being a variant of Windows for PCs and Mac OS for Macintoshes).  I ended up going to Ubuntu, one of the most popular alternative operating systems for personal computers today.  As has been noted before, getting information from a manufacturer’s website opens one up to the possibility of bias, which must be kept in mind.  The manufacturer bills Ubuntu being fast, easy to use, and free, which I can personally attest to, based on a trial run I did several months ago on one of my own computers.  In addition to more-standard downloads where it will replace your current O/S, one can acquire a variant download which can fit on and be run from a CD or USB stick, or which can be configured to “dual-boot” on your system – you choose at system start up whether you’d like to run on Windows or Ubuntu, depending on your needs.  There is a wide variety of free application software designed to run with Ubuntu, much of it mostly or completely compatible with standard equivalents (audio players running standard MP3 formatted music, a word-processing application which is largely compatible with Microsoft Office Word, etc.), and the desktop layout is highly configurable based on the user’s own preferences.  You may or may not like it – but you’ll never know if you don’t take a look, and it costs nothing to try it.

The main website address is http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu.