F.A.Q.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is Ultimate Edition?
- What is the release cycle of Ultimate Edition?
- How do I test / install Ultimate Edition?
What is Ultimate Edition ??
You use it nearly everyday, yet you probably didn’t think twice about purchasing it. It controls most of your work, yet you didn’t think you had a choice when you hired it as your personal manager. What is it? Your secretary?
No, its your operating system. The most important part of the computer experience, your operating system serves as the base of everything you do on your PC. When you purchased your car, you went through extensive research and bargaining. So why not do the same for your OS, which you spend a lot of your day using?
Chances are you’re running a version of Microsoft Windows, probably XP or Vista. These are great products that open the doors to many great PC capabilities. But what if there was another choice that truly offered the same or better performance in all five key areas: speed, safety, appearance, compatibility, and user friendliness?
That choice is here today: Ultimate Edition, with a price tag of $0. Thanks to the power of open source software, what once was a basement hacker’s operating system of choice is now being used on thousands of desktops and allowing users to do things they never thought possible. Based on the renowned Linux operating system, Ultimate Edition offers unparalleled levels of speed, safety, appearance, compatibility, and user friendliness.
Speed
How many times do you find yourself reaching for a cup of coffee after powering on your PC? This lengthily process doesn’t have to waste your time. Boot-up times of over a minute are commonplace in Windows, yet are unheard of with Ultimate Edition. Our test system consistently boots up in under 20 seconds. With this time savings, you can get more work done with less waiting.
But it doesn’t stop there. Once you are logged in, the desktop is ready to use immediately. No more waiting for icons to load. And each application loads instantly. You don’t need a supercomputer for blazing speed–you just need a super OS!
Safety
Viruses, spy-ware, Trojan horses! These phrases are known by almost every computer user–and have fostered a multi-million dollar software industry just to protect PCs running Microsoft Windows. Not only do security suites add to the cost of your PC, they also detract further from the performance of your computer.
But with Ultimate Edition, anti-virus software is a thing of the past! Since there are virtually no security threats in the wild for the Linux kernel, your PC is safe and sound with just the pre-installed firewall. No extra security software is needed.
While phishing threats (fraudulent attempts to obtain your personal information) can affect any user on any platform, Mozilla Firefox protects you from these risks and at the same time giving you a faster, more dynamic browsing experience just as it does on the Windows platform.
Appearance
Everyone loves eye candy, especially in video games. But what if you could have cool 3D effects on your desktop that actually helped you get work done? We’re not talking about Windows Flip-3D folks: that is child’s play compared to what is offered with Ultimate Edition.
Not only can you easily switch between running programs with ease–you can have multiple desktops, or workspaces, each geared toward a certain activity. For instance, you might run a web browser and word processor in one, while running a media player in another, while your camera downloads photos in a third desktop. Best yet, you can switch between these dynamic workspaces in a variety of cool ways: a 3D cube, fluid panel layout, or a simple key combination allow you to multi-task. And you can simply drag and drop windows between your workspaces to get everything set just as you like.
Polished appearance isn’t just for multitasking. Ultimate Edition offers a level of refinement and personalisation unheard of on other platforms. You can customise window borders, task bars, application docks and more from dozens of pre-installed themes with the click of a mouse. Your PC can be truly yours–not the way some programmer in Washington thought it should be.
Compatibility
All this sounds good and dandy. But wait, if it can’t run your most important applications, what good is it? Ultimate Edition to the rescue! Not only can you choose from hundreds (yes, hundreds) of pre-installed applications for everything from syncing your iPod to burning CDs to building websites, you can run all of your favorite Windows applications just as you did in XP or Vista.
Thanks to Wine, the Windows Emulator found pre-installed with Ultimate Edition, your favorite Windows programs-Word, Excel, Photoshop, and a plethora of games–are just a click away. Download a Windows program or insert the install CD-Wine does the rest. And surprisingly, Windows programs run just as fast in Ultimate Edition as they do in XP or Vista, thanks to the thin, streamlined Linux kernel. You can see the applications usable with wine at appdb.winehq.org.
Programs are great, but what about your hardware. Will your camera, PDA, and printer all work with Ultimate? The answer is a resounding yes–and you won’t have to do a thing! Thanks to the fabulous work of Ultimate Edition developers, drivers are pre-installed for almost every piece of hard ware you can imagine. On our test system, our TV Tuner, wireless card, printers, digital camera, and more all worked from the moment we plugged them in. No more searching for driver disks in the messy depths of your file cabinet.
User Friendliness
Everyone talks about it, but what truly makes a product user friendly? To us, it means that a product is easy to learn, makes sense, and that you can easily obtain assistance if you can’t figure something out. Ultimate Edition fulfils all of these requirements.
Look at the screenshots– essentially, your Ultimate Edition desktop looks much like the one you’re using right now. The same point and click icons, menus, and search boxes that you’re used to will make it easy to adapt to the benefits of Ultimate. And if you don’t like something the way it is, change it! There are dozens of different menus, task bars, sidebars, and docks to choose from to make it easy to use your computer.
And if you can’t figure something out, Ultimate Edition forums are available to answer all of your questions. Located on our Forum & now on our very own Australian forum, as well as at the Israeli site the fabulous community of Ultimate Edition developers and users will make you feel welcome and help you to quickly answer your questions–and learn something new while your at it.
Speed, safety, appearance, compatibility, and user friendliness–Ultimate Edition covers them all. Whether you’re looking for something new to try, or if you’re serious about getting more work done, faster and easier than ever, then don’t hesitate to download and install Ultimate Edition. You can easily try it without installing–and once you make the decision, you can use it while your installing (wouldn’t you like to watch TV while your new operating system loads?). And don’t worry–you can keep Windows on your system too. Ultimate installs a nice boot menu where you can select whether you would like to start your PC in Ultimate Edition or Windows.
If you’re in the market for a new PC, why not get Ultimate Edition pre-installed alongside (or instead of) Windows?
With this powerful combination of great features, reliability, speed, and ease of use, Ultimate Edition truly offers something no other operating system does.
And with a price tag of $0, how can you say no?
Thanks TheeMahn (-;
The above was written by Blackwolf, one of our administers. We also have a more elaborate online guide that is far from complete. I do suggest a browse of the F.A.Q. on the forum it is constantly being updated by our administers. We have over 15,000 members there and people help people one great big happy family 😉
A slew of information is available: Total posts 73410 • Total topics 7412 • Total members 16845
If you would like to learn how to make your own Linux concoction I wrote an article to assist there as well, we are all about sharing and helping people here.
What is the release cycle of Ultimate Edition?
With the exception of the recent Alpha / Beta releases. Ultimate Edition does not conform to any release cycle or schedule. They are built from the stable tree of Ubuntu and are not released until administers, beta testers and I are satisfied with the release. We strive for perfection.
Releases do conform with an even / odd number versioning system the even numbers IE Ultimate Edition 2.6 is Gnome based only. Odd releases IE Ultimate Edition 2.7 has Gnome as well as KDE and sometimes more environments. LXDE, XFCE for example. Since Ultimate Edition 3.6 I have been writing software to automate the entire building process. Removing 1,000 programmers at a time if necessary. You can not beat software, it does not have a bad day, it just does as it was programmed to do. Today, the software I have written can build over 5,000 operating systems. I will demonstrate that fully. We own http://os-builder.com for example. I intend to bring servers online from my basement to meet our users needs. Building your custom O/S for you. We are not there YET! I further want to inject Repostorm to automate the fixing of errors as it is being built. Stay tuned.
Please see the table below for further information:
We also have speciality releases for the gaming type called Gamers Edition, all gamers edition’s are based on the even cycle gnome only to allow more space to add additional games.
We now provide a "Lite Edition" for computers with low resources, typically powered by Mate, XFCE or LXDE environment.
How do I test / install Ultimate Edition?
Ultimate Edition is great, unlike "Other O/S’s" It allows you to test drive it right off the Live DVD without making any changes to your computer. Naturally it will run slower then it would after being installed, but allows you to make sure everything is going to work before taking the plunge and installing it. Back in the past I had a TV capture card and have watched TV on my computer as it was installing. Eat your heart out M$ 😉
The process involved can be relatively hard for a new user. No, I do not want to scare you away. Many failures in this department are due to a corrupt download or a bad burn. I would like to take the extra time to address both these issues to help make things smooth sailing. I would also like to provide an alternative way of installing it, so easy a cave man could do it 🙂 Provided you have a USB thumb drive of 4GB or greater capacity.
MD5SUM & Windows
MD5SUM is a basic Cyclic Redundancy Check used to ensure the copy you downloaded is not corrupt, this is an important step. It will save you tons of heartache down the road, possibly a few DVD coasters. Md5sum is built into Linux.
I went through some troubled times here trying to find a easy to use & free version of md5sum for Windows. After 4 or 5 of them I settled with winmd5sum, fairly straight forward and easy to use. You need to only copy the md5sum alpha-numeric for the release you have downloaded from the page, browse to the file and click compare:
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Now you know you have a good copy, what now? In Windows 7 it could not be much easier, simply right click the file and click Burn ISO File. MAKE SURE YOU BURN AT YOUR DVD BURNERS SLOWEST SPEED!!!:
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Running an older version of windows like xp? All is not lost, I found a free ISO burning tool called Active ISOBurner. MAKE SURE YOU BURN AT YOUR DVD BURNERS SLOWEST SPEED!!!:
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MD5SUM & Linux
Burning & md5sum all in a few steps.
- Open k3b
- Click more actions at the bottom and select burn image.
- Browse to where you downloaded the ISO
- The Md5sum is shown in the middle, as above compare it to the webpage you downloaded it from
- Select DVD drives slowest burn speed.
- Click Start
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Windows, Linux and USB
I have created a custom UNetBootin for Ultimate Edition to make life easy, It will even optionally download the ISO for you. Weather you use Windows or Linux you need only to download this file and extract it anywhere you like go into the folder you extracted it. If running windows double click the unetbootin-windows-485.exe. unetbootin-linux-485 if you are running Linux. The screen shots I am going to provide below are from windows, however the program runs exactly the same no matter which O/S you run it in. You need only to select which distribution you wish to run, select your USB thumb drive and click O.k.
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Already downloaded the ISO no problem click disk image option select the ISO and click O.k.
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No matter which direction you went you should end up with the following:
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All you need to do now is reboot from USB to test it or optionally install. USB is the only way I install, I would go through about 100 DVD’s a month otherwise 😉
Enjoy UE,
TheeMahn