First time install of Ubuntu
 

When I say I am new to Linux, I am 99% new. I have a Toshiba laptop that I bought at a local pawn shop. I know, dumb move but money is scarce. It has an 80G HDD and someone put Win7 Ultimate installed. Lot of problems but I finally got it going decently. 2G RAM. Not much, but would be a nice learning tool for Ubuntu. I have downloaded 14.04 and have it on a thumb drive. What do I do now to install Ubuntu as the ONLY operating system? Thanks for any help.

Have a look at ubuntu wiki, where the installation process is described in detail.

The installation process is pretty straight forward for Ubuntu. I'm not 100 sure ( I would double check the wiki mentioned above ) but if you boot off your USB you should be able to complete the installation with no issues.

Welcome aboard.

Likely you can run it 'live' to test that your hardware is supported before actually installing it.

Then when you want to install it, just go with the defaults recommended, this will get you up & running so that you can start learning.

(When your machine boots up, go into the setup & enable booting from USB before HDD.)

It might be a good idea to read a tutorial on it first. The link below is to the Ubuntu site and explains installing. You should have an option to Erase disk and install Ubuntu which is what you say you want.

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/deskt...ubuntu-desktop

Hi...

Welcome to the forum :)

Also, if you find that Ubuntu 14.04 is too sluggish on your system, there are other midweight and lightweight distributions you can try, such as Lubuntu, MX-14 and Zorin OS 9 Lite. :)

Regards...

To suggest a fitting distro, you need to post the hardware spec of your laptop.

It would be useful also to know the video RAM. Ubuntu's Unity desktop is a hungry beast.

You might want to take a look at Lubuntu, Ubuntu with the light-weight LXDE desktop. LXDE is also more like a traditional desktop than Unity.

To build on what fatmac said, most distros offer a "Live Mode," in which you can boot directly into the distro from an optical disk or from a USB stick. Running the distro from a CD/DVD will be slower than running it from a hard drive, but it will give you a chance for a look-see. If you find yourself torn among several distros, try them out in live mode" and then pick the one that seems most congenial.

Good luck.