From scratch: re-installing Ubuntu 8.04

What a pity… after trying the alternate ubuntu CD of 8.04 I almost lost my “Home” directory.

For Ms-Windows guys: it is somehow like your local “C:” drive, or – if tobe more precise – like the “My Documents and settings”.

I was lucky enough to have two things:

1) A backup of all important documents;

and:

2) Mandriva 2008.1 Gnome CD that I tried “exposed” it – It showed me the lost “/home” directories – so I could take a second backup. It is a separate partition – which is in the Ms-Windows world a logical disk / hard drive.

So … I was so happy with what Mandriva showed me that I really think to go back to this lovely Linux distribution. I still have good memories from it, when it was still called “Mandrake”.

But for the meantime – and since my “/home” was no really gone I re-install Ubuntu 8.04 from scratch.

I told the installer – of course – to use the same /sda7 partition for “/home” without formatting it.

My beginning with Linux (2000-2004)

The first Linux I tried was Red Hat.

This was around 2000 – 2001, just before the end of my M.A. studies.

It was Red Hat 6.1 or 6.2, which I got on a CD-ROM with a Linux book. I think I stil have this CD with the book.

It is Peter Norton Linux book translated to Hebrew:

‫ נורטון, פיטר

LINUX : המדריך השלם / של פיטר נורטון ; (תרגום ועריכה: ענת קדם [בןצבי] ; עריכה מקצועית: אייל אייזנשטיין).

(רג) : פוקוס מחשבים, 2000. רמת גן

Around 2002-2003 I played furthermore with later RedHat distributions and got used to work with the Gnome desktop.

I do think that KDE is nice and easy desktop, and it’s very rich and flexible – but for me Gnome was the first so I still keep it as my favorite.

The last Red Hat I tried was Red Hat 8, in 2003 or 2004. I think I tried to have a dual-boot PC and it ruined the Windows partition.

So I had to recover it. It was also my mother’s PC …

Than I used Mandrake which was close enough to Red Hat (using RPM) but also had nice GUI for editing partitions.