I was going to write a quick post on how to burn a DVD from an ISO file, which I’d never done before, but after figuring out how in all of 80 seconds last night, I’m now of the opinion that the act of burning an ISO DVD segregates people into two categories:
- Those that can learn how to do so in 80 seconds (or less)
- Those who couldn’t care less what an ISO file is an just want the damn computer to work.
So, no long post explaining my process. I just googled “burn iso dvd”, browsed the top 10 and settled on imgburn.com, which was incredibly easy to use (and had a mac-esque UI for a windows program), though it did result in a zombie process that required me restarting my computer. Lame.
The reason I needed to burn a few ISO dvds is that I picked up a few more pieces of hardware (4 GB RAM, a real graphics card to replace the one integrated with the motherboard, DVD burner) to make Frankenstein desktop workable. I tried it with Vista a while back but the graphics card made it painful to use. When I first got it I intended for the computer to have Ubuntu Server (i.e. no X windowing) installed, but that proved to be too much of a hassle for a noob like my, so I’ll be installing Ubuntu Desktop. At the same time, the Windows 7 beta is freely available, so I thought I’d give that a try too.
I haven’t had a chance to install either – just ran through the RAM checker with Ubuntu last night (such a useful utility, as I’ve discovered RAM problems the hard way in previous computers), but I did stumble across a pretty cool feature with Ubuntu – the OS will boot from the DVD entirely into ram. Obviously you can’t save anything locally, which is a problem if you want to install new programs, but basic word processing could be saved to a network drive (or usb drive), and if you just need to use the internet you don’t need to. Any chance Windows 7 will allow that?
Currently: Ubuntu 1, Windows 7 0.
Posted by Shane Arney 