So after my recent exploits once again playing with Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10 betas, I decided to see if I could make the switch from Microsoft Windows 7 to Ubuntu 11.10. Perhaps I’m fueled by excitement of the first game of the World Series that includes our beloved Texas Rangers, or perhaps it is the glitter of something new and different. Both are entirely possible. This series of posts will allow me to portray my personal experience in making the switch, or perhaps failing and switching back. Let’s see how this goes.
The machine I am using is a Dell Latitude E6510 with 4GB RAM, 320GB HD, Processor: Intel® Core™ i7 CPU Q 720 @ 1.60GHz × 8 and graphics card: NVS 3100M/PCI/SSE2. As such, I am installing the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 11.10.
My first step was to make a backup of my Windows 7 machine personal files. My organization uses CrashPlan Pro Enterprise which is really a fantastic product for client machine backups. [Maybe a review is in order] The regular version is free for personal backup use as of this writing. The Crashplan client is available for Mac, Microsoft Windows, Linux and Solaris.
I backed up My Documents and My Pictures folders and all of my local Microsoft Outlook .pst files to an external hard drive. I figured that if I was going to do this, I’d go all in so I used the external hard drive as I planned to fully format my existing laptop internal drive. [Talk about committed.] 
Installation
After backing up my most important files, I downloaded the Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit .iso image and then created a bootable CD using CDBurnerXP.
I booted up from an Ubuntu 11.10 Live CD I had created *before* I left Windows 7. Upon booting the Live CD, I chose the Install Ubuntu option and followed the prompts.
I chose a custom disk configuration, “something else” from the how to install screen, so that the /home mount point would be a separate partition. This comes from previous experience.
By having the /home mount point on a separate partition from the / mount point, I could reinstall the system if needed, without losing all of my personal documents and settings. Not Windows registry to get gunked up in Linux.As an example, all my Thunderbird email, account settings and preferences are all stored in the .thunderbird folder of my home directory. If I ever needed to move Thunderbird to another machine, I could bring that folder over and be up an running quickly.
During the installation setup,also also chose the options for installing updates as well as the 3rd party software as part of the installation.
Away ran the Ubuntu installer. I anxiously watched the informative “ads” touting the virtues of Ubuntu 11.10. Finally I was prompted to reboot and remove the installation media. A few minutes later and I was ready to login.
Upon my first login I saw the updated Unity interface. Now, there are some verse diverse and strongly held opinions on the Unity interface versus Gnome and Gnome 3 (gnome-shell). I have no desire to get into that fray. I for one will go with what I like the most and provides me alone with the best usability on the platform. The folks over at OMG! Ubuntu! have a number of good articles including this one that show you some of the changes or help orient you to the Unity interface.
Knowing that I needed to be able to be productive at the office the following morning I prioritized what to setup first.
Updates
Just in case you forgot to check the box to download and apply updates during the installation, you should check for and apply updates. There are a number of way to do this. You could press the “super” key (Windows Key) and then type “update”. Select the update manager.
Alternatively you could click the “power” icon in the upper right hand corner and see if “Updates are Available”. If so, click to launch the update manager.
Be sure to click the “Check” button first to ensure you have the latest cache of what updates are needed. Then click “Install Updates”.
If you prefer, you could use the command line in a terminal window instead:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Once every is updated, you may need to reboot if instructed to. Otherwise, you can continue to work. This my dear friend is one of the beauties of Linux.
Restore
My first priority was to restore my documents, files and email archives so I could reference them. I used the default Firefox browser to download the Crashplan client. After extracting the contents using the built-in archive manager, I ran the ./install.sh installation script and took all of the default responses to the script questions.
This placed the Crashplan icon on my desktop. Double clicking the icon start the client user interface. From this point I restored my backed up files and folders to appropriate places in my home directory. My Documents contents went into the Documents folder. My Pictures folder contents were restored to the Pictures folder. Finally I create a new folder in my home directory called “temp”. I then restored all my Microsoft Outlook .pst files into the temp folder.
Email Setup
Much of my day revolves around email. As such, I had to get email setup and running quickly. In Ubuntu 11.10 the default email client is now Thunderbird, replacing the previous Evolution default. Our mail server support POP3, SMTP, IMAP and MAPI. Thunderbird does not support MAPI. As such, I had decided upon an IMAP setup. To my surprise as I walked through the Thunderbird setup wizard, the IMAP and SMTP mail server settings were detected and setup automatically.
Immediately my inbox sprung to life. A quick send of a test message to a personal mail account proved that SMTP mail sending was also working. Now it was time to setup a few preferences. First, our organization asks us to use a standard common HTML signature for our outgoing emails. In Thunderbird from the Edit menu, choose Account Settings. Find the option for “Use HTML” and check the box. Then copy and paste the HTML for the signature. Click OK and I was done.
Now I had functioning email. One feature I immediately fell in love with was the ability to search all email folders for keywords at once. Goodbye Outlook! Once you type in the search terms in the search box you are presented the results page. This is where I fell in love. The interface easily allows you to further refine your results by pre-defined filters, people, folders, accounts, tags and even year, month and day. Filtering allows for both positive and negative filtering. i.e. All email from Tom or all emails except from Tom . This I think is far and above Microsoft Outlook.
Now that my precious email services were working, I needed to finish getting calendars and services setup in order to ensure I am able to work tomorrow….
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