Well, the title is quite explicit.. What?? Linux??! WTF! You don't use Vista man? Nope, I don't! I don't want a resource hogger (15GB of disk space!) so I decided to give Kubuntu a chance... But I'm still a Linux n00b... for now!

So, after long chats with Sundeep a.k.a Dea-|-h, I decided to give Linux a try. He recommended that I start with Kubuntu on Live CD. I downloaded the 700MBs of Kubuntu, burned the ISO to a CD, and booted from it on my laptop. At first, it looks a bit geeky with lots of commands popping up, but after KDE appears, it's magnificent! The Desktop looks so clean and the menu so practicable. However, after some experimentation, I found that I could not access my NTFS partition on which WinXP resided. That kinda annoyed me. After some research on the net, I found that support for NTFS in Linux is still experimental, and that it could safely be read but not written to.

I refered to other sources and friends, and they did not seem to have this problem. Zlug recommended that I install Kubuntu to my hard-disk on my main pc and that it would be a lot better. However, I could not do it immediately since I had important files and didn't want to format.

Then? By some miracle bad luck, the hard-disk on the Laptop failed. I sent it for repairs (since I don't have access to laptop parts and am no laptop technician). It came back with a single 80GB NTFS partition with WinXP SP2 on that. Again, I could not format since I didn't have the SP2 update package at hand. Then I remembered that there are programs that can resize partitions! A quick google search returned quite a few, including Ranish Partition Manager. Another great program is Paragon Partition Manager that supports lots of File Systems, but unfortunately, it's not free. It's great anyways. So I stuck with Ranish. I booted from floppy (yea, call me archaic). I selected the NTFS partition and set the new sizes and it did the rest.

In the end, I came up with 16GB NTFS, 55GB FAT32, and around 10GB of RAW space. Why such a configuration? WinXP SP2 was left intact on the 16GB. I got 55GB of free space to be shared by both Linux and Windows (since NTFS is risky, I prefered FAT32). And got some RAW space to setup Linux. I was ready to go.

I booted on the Live CD and ran the installer. It was easy and well-guided. I had to manually edit the partition table.

Here I did a grave mistake. On the 10GB I formatted it to EXT3. After I proceeded, the Kubuntu Installer notified me that I did not set the Swap File partition. WTF? I returned and checked. Indeed, there was no Swap File in the step where I get to set mount points! :s

Then, I found that I had to create a Primary partition of around 9GB, and an Extended partition of around 1GB for the Swap File from the 10GB of RAW space! I formatted the 9GB with EXT3 and the 1GB with "Linux-Swap"! Here's how you determine Swap partition! Quite weird! How to create partitions? Manually edit the partition table, right-click an empty space on the schema given and select create. Set your sizes and File System and you are off. Simple. But the Linux-Swap was really well hidden! So it's worth paying attention here.

After that, things went smoothly and soon enough, I had a beautiful Kubuntu running on my Laptop, along with my WinXP SP2 untouched! :P

More to come soon...

0 comments:


 

Copyright 2006| Blogger Templates by GeckoandFly modified and converted to Blogger Beta by Blogcrowds.
No part of the content or the blog may be reproduced without prior written permission.
Template Edits by Infinity.
Trademarks and copyrights belong to their respective authors