For someone who was familiar with UNIX in its heyday they will find that Linux is pretty much a clone of UNIX with one major exception, Linux is free! UNIX is a world class operating system that has been around for more than 30 years. Before, nearly every different machine type had its own special code or operating system written for it. Its creation was a successful attempt of making an OS that would work on many different types of machines. Linux gives you these same qualities and more for little or no cost.

The kernel or “heart” of Linux is free at least. At work we used one copy of Ubuntu Server Resources walkthroughs on ten computers at our office and nearly saved $2,000 total on the OS alone. The computers were sometimes used to remote into a Windows server via MSTSC to train our users on various Windows applications. We gave one class where we needed to teach some advanced operations in Excel. Everyone logged into the windows application server from their Ubuntu machine using terminal services. They had their own folder for their Excel projects. Not only did this save on licenses but the RAM, and processors needed to run Ubuntu were much cheaper. We bought new machines with somewhat lower resources than a Windows machine would require and ran Linux flawlessly.

If you want a nice audio program, that can load and play a whole bunch of stuff, and also converts from one format to another, and allows you to edit and record, try AUDACITY. It’s an open source program and works very nicely. Also remember that Microsofts Media Player is also free, if you are running Windows operating system on your PC. You might just have to authenticate your version of Windows with them.

A lot of people like Ubuntu because it’s malware-free, virus-free, comes with a ton of free apps and has a great community surrounding it. But others don’t, because either they like their computers the way they are or Ubuntu Server Guides doesn’t do something they want it to … like play their favorite Windows game, or work with their graphics card.

There are more websites in which I personally use to dig information about people, but I will not mention them since I do not want the news station going crazy on a new rage of identity exposers. Here’s an example of a person I Ubuntu Server Walkthroughs searched for the sake of showing.

You can try going to YouTube and playing videos. If you have a built in microphone, you can open Audacity by going to the Applications menu and down to “Multimedia” and then to “Audacity.” Open it and hit the red circle button to try to record. Talk for a little while or sing a song. Then hit the square button. Hopefully it detected sound and the line is not flat.

Open Synaptic packages – it will say that it needs to install updates. Tell it OK and wait for them to install. After they do, you are ready to install software and use your machine!