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Make The Move

Make The Move is about your choice of software on your computer. It shouldn't be left up to some store to give you something that they get a rebate on. It shouldn't be something that restricts you in how you use it and what you can do with it, that reports back to its makers without telling you, that could stop you using it if it decides you need to pay them more money. It shouldn't tie up your music and your DVDs, locking them into formats that you can't put on your portable music player. It shouldn't tie up your files to be only sharable with people who have paid money for the same products.

You can choose. There's software for your computer that doesn't restrict your use of it. Software that allows you to share your files easily. Software that just works. Software that you don't have to pay a lot of money for. Make The Move is about moving to use this kind of software. It's is called Free Software or Open Source Software. It offers everything from the raw software to run your machine safely and securely, up to all the applications you want to use - word processors, spreadsheets, presentation, photo and drawing programs, games of all varieties, browsers and chat programs and many more.

Make The Move!

Similar sites to Make the Move

Need more convincing? Try these sites!

Hardware and choosing the right distribution

A good way to work out how to make the move is to know what you're already using.

Windows 98, 95 or older

Microsoft's support for Windows 98 is now discontinued. You are almost certainly vulnerable to attack any time your computer is on the internet! But your computer hardware is still perfectly capable of running one of the many Small Linux Distributions. You don't need to spend lots of money to get an industry-standard operating system with industrial-strength protection.

Windows 2000 and XP

Your computer is probably easily capable of using one of the regular Full Linux Distributions. Check out the list to see what's good for you!

Apple Mac OS-X, System 9 and lower

There are many versions of Linux capable of running on Macintosh computers. We have a list of Linux For Macintosh distributions.

Other information

The Hardware Catalogue is a catalogue of people's experiences with using various hardware with Open Source Software.

There's also a Store Catalogue for people's experiences with service at stores (in Canberra) when wanting to buy a computer that's going to work with Free and Open Source Software.

Find the right distribution for you by answering a short quiz!

Just go to the Linux distribution chooser page and take the short test if you don't want to read too much stuff. ;)

Disclaimer: This quiz does not take into account all distributions. But if you are new to Linux, that doesn't matter since the major ones are included.

For the most complete list of distributions, go to http://distrowatch.com/.

Other useful articles to choose the right distribution: http://www.psychocats.net/essays/whichdistro.php

Concerning the various official versions of Ubuntu, here's a short overview:

  • Ubuntu: Uses the GNOME desktop interface->If you have a recent computer (more than 256MB of RAM)
  • Kubuntu: Uses the KDE desktop interface->If you have a recent computer (more than 256MB of RAM)
  • Xubuntu: Uses the XFCE desktop interface->If you have a computer with rather modest specifications (between 128 MB of RAM to 256 MB of RAM)

Note: Once you've installed one flavour of Ubuntu, it's easy to install the other desktop interfaces if you want to try them out:

There are also other Desktop environments available.

If you have 64 MB of RAM or less, you should consider using a Small Linux Distribution.

General installation procedure for dual-booting

Dual-booting consists in installing Linux on your PC, while keeping Windows. This allows you to test Linux completely (a Live-CD doesn't allow you to install programs), while still being able to use Windows whenever you want. After a dual-boot installation, a so-called bootloader will allow you to choose which OS you want to boot at startup.

Here's how to proceed for any Linux distribution: (Please note that 5GB is just an arbitrary size which is more than big enough for most modern Linux distributions.)

  1. Download & burn the CD/DVD of the Linux distribution. (net-install,basic install or full install)
  2. Backup important data. (You don't have to, but it is recommended in case you do anything wrong.)
  3. Make sure you have at least 5GB of free disk space (but can be less for some distributions).
  4. Defragment the Windows partition if you plan to resize it. (use the Windows defragmenter)
  5. Create a 5GB partition on your hard disk by eventually resizing the windows partition.
  6. Start the installation from he CD.

Partitioning can be done either by booting with the Linux CD, with a GParted Live-CD or from Windows with the software of your choice. Most new distributions are very user-friendly for the installation and offer a graphical interface for partitioning the hard disk.

Software

Open Source Software Equivalents
Pre-move Open Source Software
Outlook Evolution, Thunderbird (use with Lightning or Sunbird for calendaring), KMail, Kontact, Balsa
Internet Explorer Firefox, Seamonkey, Galeon, Konqueror

References

Education

The Canberra Linux Users Group is working on providing opportunities to learn about Free and Open Source Software, initially at InstallFests and Training Talks.

Promotion

You can promote Make The Move by getting some Fliers, Stickers, Graphics for your website. We're also aiming to have some Video and Audio podcasts and adverts to amuse, entertain and inform.

Support

Some thoughts on Support.

What the French do

  • Free software activism Put this through Google and to expand on a topic in Support, perhaps on an open day or similiar, a number of stations could be deployed manned by experts in user type applications, Scribus, Inkscape, The Gimp or whatever. For example, the Scribus team at the Paris show will be producing newsletters on the spot.

HowTos

  • CustomUbuntu - HowTo install a minimal, custom Ubuntu with all the goodies you want!
  • LDAP-Samba - HowTo set up Samba domain with LDAP backend (Ubuntu/Debian)

MediaWiki

This site is built using MediaWiki. If you're unfamiliar with this software then please visit the MediaWiki page for more information.

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