Try Ubuntu through Wubi

If you always wanted to try Ubuntu and didn't want to install it fiddling with partitions on your hard disk - you should really try Wubi.

Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other application and it does this by installing Ubuntu into a single file as opposed to installing on a partition

Download the installer

Via Wubi

Compiling & Installing a perl module

This is a basic but essential tip on how to install a perl module

First of all, get the perl module via http://search.cpan.org

For example - XML::Twig

wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/M/MI/MIROD/XML-Twig-3.26.tar.gz

Extract it

tar zxvf XML-Twig-3.26.tar.gz

Now execute the following steps

perl Makefile.PL (Create the makefile)
make (compile the module)
make test (test the module)
sudo make install (install the module)

You can also use perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/opt/perl/modules

to install your module at a different location - /opt/perl/modules

Ubuntu - cloning package installations

Right - you have a Ubuntu system in which you have used for quite a while and installed a lot of programs. You now want to install the same set of applications on another machine or maybe even save up in case you want to reformat.

Here are the steps

1. Export the list of applications using

dpkg --get-selections | grep '[[:space:]]install$' | awk '{print $1}' > list_of_packages

2. Copy your /etc/sources.list from the current machine and copy to your target machine

Now on your target machine

Do

1. sudo apt-get update

to update the sources list

2. cat list_of_packages | xargs sudo apt-get install

to install the packages!