Ubuntu 8.4

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Hi every one, I'm Blake and I just installed Ubuntu 8.4. and I was wondering what are the ups and downs of this program and is it better then windows. I currently have Win7 but if i get convinced with Ubuntu, I'll download the newest version.
just by playing around i noticed I can't play games, open software or click on any .exe. Is this fix-able or something.
please help me out with this, thanks

The PE structure (which is implented in Windows-executable programs, as in .exe, .dll, .ocx, and so on) is not used in Unix systems, it uses the COFF structure instead. This means that it is not possible to use any programs made for Windows on Ubuntu in this case. However, there is a software called "WINE" which can emulate Windows on Ubuntu, which makes it possible to run some e.g. .exe files.

What is your primary reason to use Ubuntu, by the way? It appears you would be better off using Windows for now.

(Anyway, I'd suggest you to instantly update to Ubuntu 10.04, as the changes from 8.4 to 10.04 are radical. You might not experience any drastic changes in the first place, however start using it and you'll understand what I mean.)

Also it is not possible to directly determine whether which OS is the best, as they are made for different purposes. It would be like asking “What is better; tomatoes or garlic?” (As you see, it would be irrelevant to ask such a question, and you probably understand why. It all depends on the purpose of using it.)

I use both; why have to make a choice?

Best to go straight to 10.04 now, 8.04 is ancient.


Well, you can play games, but remember it's a different operating system. Programs written for Windows will not (easily) run on Ubuntu any more than programs written for Ubuntu will run on Windows. You can install Wine (be sure to install the beta version so it's more recent) and that will allow you to open some exe files. In Ubuntu, the equivalent would be a .deb file for software that will actually run properly.

Sometimes you have to go and find alternative programs for the same purpose, eg OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office.

8.04 is 2.5 years old. That is ancient in terms of Ubuntu which has a new version every six months.

8.04, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10 and now 10.04 is current.

I just Downloaded and installed Ubuntu 10.4, But now it doesn't work 8.4 is all messed up and 10.4 keeps saying "checking installed.. ect" then goes "looking for server or something 142%" and stays there for ever. I've left it there 2 days most.

You may need to do a fresh install. You seem to be saying that you have both Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) and Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04) on the same machine. Are you saying you tried to dual boot them? If that's the case you may need to delete one of your partitions. Before you do any of that though, try booting Lucid Lynx from the live CD and see if that works.

Also are there any files or data on your hard disk that you need, that aren't backed up? You may be able to recover those, and I suggest you do that before doing anything so that you don't have to lose them permanently. Otherwise you could also try booting either of them in recovery mode to find out what's wrong. If it can be fixed from recovery mode, you may not have to reinstall either of them.

By the way, you could of upgraded directly from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 without doing a fresh install by following the instructions in the link below. Although I must admit, I ended up having to do a fresh install anyway because it went badly for me. Scroll down do the part where it has the heading Upgrade from 8.04 LTS to 10.04 LTS. Here's the link:

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/upgrade

Well... What I'm trying to do is Remove Windows, format my C drive(have no thing on it) then put Ubuntu 10.4 on it

Alright, first thing's first. You need to backup everything important on Windows. I would normally recommend backing it up in a compressed archive because that preserves things that normal copying doesn't, even the dates in which the files were created. However, if you are using winzip or something, I don't know if the normal archive managers in Ubuntu Linux can read zip files as I've never tried.

Secondly, download Ubuntu and burn it to CD, if you haven't already. I take it you already have but otherwise the download and instructions for creating a CD are here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download.

One more thing, based on your previous post, I still don't know how many partitions are on your hard drive. Your hard drive can only have up to four main partitions. So if it already has four partitions due to your previous attempt at installation, then you won't be able to partition your automatically from the installation CD like what you may have done in your first attempt. You need to create another bootable CD, but this time of a partition editor called GParted. Here's the link:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php.

Once you've created your GParted CD from the download, boot from the CD. Once booted click on the GParted button, and you should get a list of your partitions and information about them. Don't do anything else yet, just get a piece of paper and write down that information, including the names of the partitions, what file systems they use and whether boot Windows Linux etc. Once you've written down that information, click on the logout button, and the CD will eject and your machine will reboot. Then post that information here so that either myself or someone else can help you further.

Stop. Yes you can. Ubuntu LiveCDs contain gparted, which is all you get with the gparted image. You dont need the second disk.

My mistake, I forgot about that. Sorry Blake, forget what I said about downloading GParted. Just boot from the Ubuntu CD and then choose to boot the the Live CD instead of installing. At the top panel choose System -> Administation -> GParted. You can get the same information that way.

You can also install stuff to a liveCD, though it doesnt persist after a reboot. The liveCD concept is awesome.

Well, .exe files are Windows executables, so you can't run them in Linux unless you have an emulator. I don't know what you mean by "open software". I have had no trouble with that in Debian Linux (the MS-DOS emulator won't open but everything else will. I've even installed Firefox and Thunderbird and they work perfectly). And when you say games, what sort of games are you referring to? If you mean Half-Life and Halo, then yeah, those won't run on Linux. They're made strictly for use in Windows, because alternative operating systems simply don't have enough market share for game companies to make tons of money writing stuff for them. But there are plenty of games that run on Mac and Linux. I have several games that came with my distro. The only problem with Linux is that full-screen animation is utter crap. I wouldn't suggest playing anything really graphics-intensive on it.

I would suggest dual-booting between Windows and Linux. You can boot into Linux when you want to program or go on the internet without getting a virus, and you can boot into Windows when you want to play your games and run your .exe files. It's good to know how to use multuple operating systems, because no OS is perfect.

I really don't understand, though. People say Ubuntu is hard to use, but I'm having no problem using Debian, which is supposedly at a higher difficulty level. Maybe I'm just lucky, I don't know.

I play fallout 3 on mine, and spore and the sims 3 worked too. All under the playonlinux front end for WINE.

Really? For me, the animation is just incremental, one frame after another. My experience of this has been with online videos and screensavers, not with games. I would think it has more to do with how Linux renders animation than with software compatibility. Animation outside of full screen is fine, though.

Those work fine too. I have an nvidia gtx 250 graphics card using the nvidia(nonfree) linux drivers, as installed with system>administration>hardware drivers.