I have decided to try Ubuntu on a Toshiba Satellite A100 laptop that I have been given. At present, it has Vista Pro loaded, which make it crawl with its 880Meg of RAM. I want to use it with a HP Deskjet 845c printer, a digicam, a Canon 600F scanner, Star Office, and a photo edit software program. A likely proposition?

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Hi Mooncat,

I'm typing this in Firefox on Ubuntu on a Toshiba A100-027 (PC World finest!) with 2GB RAM - I had the 1GB increased to 2GB because of Vista's demands but Vista was grindingly slow and needed re-installing. No complaints now I'm on ubuntu.

For your peripherals: I'd look on the internet for your printer and scanner - e.g. https://www.linuxquestions.org/question ... ..-279968/

Camera integration is usually quite good. I've got a card read on the front of the laptop and it happily reads 4GB SDHC cards.

StarOffice - that's the pay version - I just use openoffice - the free version - it's bundled with the Ubuntu base install.

For Photo editing, there are loads - e.g. Gimp - www.gimp.org.

Have a look at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Applications for links to lists of Ubuntu alternatives to Windows apps - or just google it.

Always try and use the Synaptic Package manage to download software - that means that when new versions of software are available, they will get updated automatically. Go to System -> Admin -> Synaptic.

For audio, video and image applications, install Ubuntu Studio via synaptic. Contains a whole suite of the applications that can help you with such tasks - see http://ubuntustudio.org/.

Go for it, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Ubuntu is an easy distro to use (using it right now)
Other way to add stuff ( and usually easier) is to click on Applications, add/remove - its a little more new person friendly

Current version is 8.10 aka Intrepid Ibex, new version will be out in the next few weeks - 9.04 aka jaunty jackalope (names are just for fun and to make things easy to remember)

best way to install Ubuntu is to use the manual partition option, set a 2 or 3GB swap partition, a 14GB / partition (where the Operating system goes) and use the rest of the drive space as a /home partition (where all your stuff goes and where the program options are kept). Means if you upgrade to the new version you can keep your stuff without having to backup and still have a clean fresh install rather than use the upgrade option in the updater, which can go wrong sometimes and leave "glitches"

HP printers normally work well under linux especially with the hp/lib software installed

Epson printers though are a pain in the rear, shame as i like their print quality.

GNU Image Manipulation Program aka G.I.M.P. is almost as good as photoshop, plus its free and making leaps and bounds all the time.

Open Office is bundled with Ubuntu, currently still on version 2.x, new version of Ubuntu will go to 3.0 (current version)

Good music player is amarok, lots of options and i prefer it to media player which i found slow as treacle.

DVD playback can easily be added, just google Ubuntu DVD playback and add the package it tells you, then copy and paste the line shown on the page into the terminal (accessories, terminal) and it should do the rest. (legal reasons prevent them bundling it with the OS)

Also you will find a lot of guides use command line instructions, this solely as its easier to tell someone to type a string of text rather than trying to describe what icons look like (and they are very very customisable)

If you need any , just ask

Had an Epson Photo R300 for years without problem. On a scale of 1-10 its at least 100000 times better than the Canon cr@p.

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What I mean is that Epsons work well under windows and macosx, but the driver support for them in Linux just isnt there (Epson farm it out to a company called avasys in japan. I know as I have several epsons and most of them have one glitch or other under linux which stops them being fully functional. On the other hand HP provide good support to the linux community meaning their kit generally works without issue.

Works well on Mac as well

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To everyone, a big thankyou.

I'll get on the job at the next opportunity.

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