Saturday, April 4, 2015

Ubuntu Linux and my family

We have a Dell laptop... a Latitude E5420. It has a regular hard drive in it, that is, platters, slowness, not being an SSD (Solid Sate Drive). It was good in its day, and is by all mean still a great laptop it needed a rebuild. I wanted to make a dedicated laptop espiceally for the television, you know for things like Steam TV, Netflix, Youtube etc. A million reasons exist why I would want a good laptop plugged up with a HMDI cable to our TV.

Now on purpose I have NOT researched Linux. I say this because there are two other huge parameters the family laptop beside the TV has to meet. It HAS to be able to very easily play movies. This will be done with previously mentioned Netflix, but it also has to be able to torrent films! We torrent alot of stuff. So I have to be able to look up a torrent, download it, and watch it - easily. Very very easily. I have done this on my phone yesterday. On my Samsung S5 I torrented an episode of Modern Family on my mobile phone. It was extremely handy and clear and obvious what I had to do.

The second parameter that the Ubuntu Linux laptop has to meet is to be able to play Minecraft! Not some older hacked version that is made to fix Linux, I mean version 8.2 comes out on the PC (Windows) and I want to be able to play it straight away. It would also be great if I could play Minecraft on the little LAN my kids set up on the two Windows 7 computers and be a third computer, but Linux.

So why did I not research any of this, I could have of course, but if Linux is going to be taken seriously but the average home user it simply has to be able to do everything that Windows can do.

So here I go.... first step is to get a laptop that I will install Linux onto. As I said, I have a Latitude E5420 but I also had a 60 gigabyte SSD hard drive laying around. So I installed the hard drive instead of the regular one that was in Dell in the first place, albeit the HD in the Dell was around 160 gig I think, basically, I am loosing alot of real estate.

So I downloaded a program from http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/#button and that will make an installer for me so I can make my USB stick into a bootable device.

I don't know what a persistent file size is so I left it alone


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