Ubuntu Linux?

Question

I want to try duel booting Ubuntu on my laptop. I work for an ISP and I need to learn as much as possible. For someone who has never used Linux is it hard to learn? Anything I should know before doing it?

Answer 1

I setup my laptop to dual boot XP and Slackware. Although XP is probably just wasting hard drive space, I left it on there just in case I happen to need it in a client environment, though I can access samba resources just as well in linux. I've used Slackware for years though. Ubuntu is relatively simple to migrate to as I understand. I personally haven't used it. There's a link to the unofficial ubuntu starter guide here: http://www.t3technet.com/linux.html which contains tons of info on ubuntu.
In an ISP environment you may be interested in the ISP HOWTO
http://www.anime.net/linuxisp/Linux-ISP-HOWTO.html
which is a a few years old, though contains some basic relevant info. A more updated version is here: http://ispltd.com/howto/index.php

Things pertinent to an ISP might be Squid proxy, BIND, sendmail (or courier or postfix), iptables, and Apache.
If the ISP uses ubuntu, here's a basic ISP setup tutorial.
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_ubuntu_5.10

Answer 2

Dual booting on a laptop with Ubuntu/XP is fairly simple. It might help to have all the disk space you want to use for Ubuntu unallocated prior to installation, you can do that with a program called Gparted. It's a free partition manager. You can re-size your partitions with it and finish (I recommend giving Ubuntu at least 8GB, 10GB to be safe) Insert the Ubuntu disc and just follow the install setup, its fairly intuitive. As a note, be careful when using Gparted to adjust your current hard drive configuration.
Ubuntu is one of the easiest to use and most flexible flavors of linux out there. I would say learning the basics of linux is fairly easy. If you would like a more in depth analysis, please visit the sources listed.

Answer 3

nah ubuntu is pretty easy and intuitive. the toolbar with the start button(which is the ubuntu logo) is up instead of down lkike on on windows which was about the only thing that confused me. but yeah its definitely easy. its just for you to be able to be functional on that O.S. you are gonna have to install countless drivers and codecs.
good luck and enjoy free software.