Bitcoin Forum

Hi

I am planning on getting a laptop to use offline for added security for my coins.

People talk a lot about Linux and Ubuntu but I dont really understand them or their benefits.

Is it worth using one or both of them?

Are they easy to get to grips with?

Thanks in advance :)

Also, any specs needed for said laptop. Given that i would like to keep it as cheap as possible if it will have no other uses.

If its going to be always offline, I would say it doesnt really matter what OS you put on it. That being said, I believe Ubuntu is the most trustable apparently because it is open source (and if you are an uber nerd and uber paranoid you can go through the lines of code yourself to see if there is a backdoor in it somewhere). Just make sure whichever setup you use that you backup a copy to a safe place. Hardware failure is not uncommon and I would not want to send away a harddrive to some far off place with all of my coins on it.

Thanks for the replies.

So it can be a second hand laptop??

I was under the impression that it must have never been online. Regarding the OS I will probably stick with windows then as i am by no means an uber nerd and would have no idea what a backdoor would even look like.  :D

I can imagine there are plenty of backdoors in Windows. As it's closed source, we can't tell.

Ubuntu and other Linux distros are a lot lighter and easier to install than windows, and they don't cache loads of RAM unlike windows.

However, as it will be mainly offline it doesn't really matter - just be prepared to wait ages if your using a laptop with low specs, as it may struggle to check the block chain quickly.

Yeah it's ok if it was online, just make sure you format the hard drive and install a new OS before using it.

Thanks mate, so i will need a copy of OS on disk then?

I just use a usb drive.

Yeah either one will work.

If I may.
Please don't use Ubuntu, Canonical (company behind Ubuntu) recently started to be very unfriendly to the rest of the Linux community. That's why I, for example, don't use it any more.
If you still want highly secure and beginner friendly Linux distribution try Fedora. It's little bit harder to master than Ubuntu but it's worth it and you will give your voice to the community, not to Canonical.

Just my 2c :)

Depends... Don't want to go all thermonuclear about DE :D (I have different forums to do that :P)

I have been using nothing but ubuntu linux for 4 years now.  I find that it is fairly easy to use.  The installation process is pretty easy if you follow the instructions on ubuntu.com.  I have borrowed windows computers at times and I don't know how people can deal with the antivirus scans all the time.  It's so convenient on linux to not have to worry about virus scans.

Yeah it's definitely user friendly. I lost my install by putting that hard drive in my NAS as a cache drive and writing zeroes to the entire drive to check for bad sectors/variance in smart reports. I had everything important backed up at least. Except the GPG key but at least it wasn't the one tied to my real name.