Thread: Ubuntu

I ordered and got a couple Ubuntu discs a while back. I had planned on installing them on my desktop, but never got around to it and have since given my desktop to the family as a family computer.

I've got my laptop now, an Acer Aspire 6920. I still want to install Ubuntu and have it dual-boot with Vista, but is there a way to go about it without having to reformat?

Yep, certainly
you've got 2 options

1)
Boot from the CD and go through the installation process
when you get to the partitioning stage, choose to resize your windows partition to make room for linux
(give Ubuntu 5Gb as a minimum)

^^ this assumes you have only 1 hard disk, if you have multiple, you can skip the resizing of the windows partition

2)
While booted in Windows, run Wubi (which is on the Ubuntu CD)
this will create a virtual hard drive within your windows partition - Ubuntu is installed onto the virtual drive
- The advantage of this is no alterations to the disk partitioning - uninstalling is easy (Ubuntu even added to the windows add/remove programs list)
- disadvantage is a slight performance loss due to using a virtualised hard disk - also, if windows goes tits up, it'll probably take Ubuntu with it

Awesome! Knew you'd get here quick. Thanks man.

That's exactly what I did, actually. I run Ubuntu (Kubuntu actually, still haven't put Gnome back on) on a third partition. It helps if you have a big HDD; Vista eats space a lot quicker than Ubuntu.

I'd recommend about 10Gb for Ubuntu, that is a comfortable balance for me. More if you're going to be using it a lot more.

Just be careful if you ever need more space for Windows. I had to delete and rewrite my Ubuntu partition to shrink it, and in doing so lost Grub, the bootloader, which meant I couldn't boot into Windows. Scared me for a few minutes until I realized that all I needed to do was reinstall Ubuntu.

I have a 280 gig Harddrive, which came partitioned into C: and D: drives by default (144 gig and 140 gig respectively). I've already nearly filled the C: partition, and there is a good 60 gigs of data on the D: partition.

Once I get to the partitioning part of Ubuntu installation, how do I proceed from there? I'm going to use the D: partition to install, or at least break it into a new 10 gig partition correct? And I need a 256mb Swap partition as well. So how do I break the D: partition apart to comfortably install Ubuntu, and not risk losing my data?

during the install, you'll have the option to resize the disk using a graphical slider

*edit*
looks like this