It was interesting to note Dell’s change in stance from making boring take-this-or-leave-it boxes to making sleek and slender designs that would have made Steve Jobs proud (and yell, ARRR!). But I digress.
Anyhow, my this notebook-buying was long due, and it was a welcome change from my dead HP Pavilion lead-beast and my dying, older Dell Inspiron monster of a stone.
However, it was a while since I’d run a good distro of Linux at home, and I was itching to try something new – Ubuntu.
In the days of yon, I used to be a devout Debian user. After using Woody for a few years (Sarge did not arrive until 2005), I gave up on Debian and moved on. In fact, the last kernel that I compiled was in 2004. And more importantly, I didn’t even use Linux at home much anymore.
But I had recently re-read Cryptonomicon for the billionth time, and reading about Randy somehow triggers an innate response in me to cater to the whims of my geek-side. And every once in a while, I’d think about trying out something new, such as Asterisk, and give up because I did not have a good enough setup at home.
So, I decided to go ahead and install Ubuntu.
Of course, Dell had assumed that like all home users, I was yet another automaton who just needed a single drive with everything piled on it (and they even had about 3.5 GB of a primary Fat32 partition that was unused and hidden — wtf, mate?!).
Anyway, my first step was to somehow create partitions without deleting any of my existing stuff. Usually, I’d do a disk-defragmentation before any partitioning. But this is a new box, so it turned out that I did not need to defrag. Since I was spared that, I went ahead and burnt an ISO of the Linux System Rescue CD to help me with the partitioning.
Once this was done, I booted from the CD and resized my existing partition, deleted a couple of other partitions that the morons at Dell had created for reasons known only to them — I had a 3.5 GB of unused Fat32 primary partition that was hidden, unused space of about 700 MB and a Fat16 partition of a few megs — why? Good lord, just why?!
Anyway, after the not-so-pleasant-exercise, I had the primary NTFS partition, which had Windows, yet another primary ext3 partition, where I’d planned to install Linux and two extended partitions — a Linux swap partition and a Fat32 partition that could be accessed from both Windows and Linux. For those that do not know the difference between primary and extended, primary partitions are bootable and extended are not. You can only have four primary partitions, and since neither the swap nor the Fat32 are likely to be booted from, they can be made into extended partitions.
Once that’s done, your next task is to reboot the machine and try running Windows — if everything works, and if the Fat32 partition can be seen, then all is good.
The next thing that I did was to pop in the Ubuntu CD, and go along with the install — this was a total breeze. It refused to boot with the default graphics mode, so I had to choose the “safe” graphics mode, which seemed just fine. Once that was done, I proceeded with the install normally until it came to the part where I needed to partition.
I choose to manually edit the partitions, and assigned the ext3 to / and made it bootable, and left the rest the way they were. And that’s it.
Ubuntu wrapped up the install, detected my hardware and installed all the drivers, got X and ALSA working and everything was up. It even installed Grub on the bootable partition automatically (rather than on the MBR, which makes Windows go cranky and do other weird, disturbing things that would cause you to stay up at night freaking out, rather than, say, updating your blog).
The next thing I know, I rebooted the box and Ubuntu was up and running — it had Gnome configured, and had a fantastic set of tools that came with the default install — I was particularly pleased to find Open Office and Firefox among the list, not to mention tools to play media (movies, music and DVDs) and burn CDs. It even had mounted my other partitions, which was nice.
So, at the end of the day, it was a pleasing, effortless exercise. I’ve not yet figured if my wireless card works, so that’s for another day. But so far, I’m extremely happy with the setup.
Having used Slackware from the days of floppy disks, Ubuntu is a pleasant change. And this is the first Linux install that’s been so easy on a notebook or a laptop.
Score? Easily, a 5.0/5.0 for install and a 4.0/5.0 on tools. It’s undoubtedly the best install I’ve ever had, however it does lack some developer tools, but that’s not a problem for most, I suppose. Then again, I probably should have downloaded the Server Edition rather than the Desktop Edition if all I’d wanted to do was hack around, so I can’t really blame them.
I’ll probably write down an article with more technical detail on the install to help other users, and put up some screenshots, but here arer a couple of links that I found useful:
At the end of the day, I’m a happy camper!
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