I loved my Ubuntu, though it had caused me great grievance as it did not get along well with my NVidea Geforce 5200 (very old, very low end) graphics card. And so, even as I've been getting to know Vista, I've been mourning the loss of Ubuntu. I got around last week to burning a bootable Ubuntu disk, and had thought installation would be a breeze...
However...I met with a few hiccups. At first, when I ran the bootable CD, after the initial Ubuntu screen I got nothing. Nada. Turns out, I had to hit F4 and run the disc in safe graphics mode. Good. Hurdle one accomplished.
Then came the install - I had to select manual install from the options, since I did not want to over-write my Vista OS, nor did I want to lose any data on my other partitions (I'd partitioned my terabyte already into several slices for my documents and photos, and data was already stored there!).
It took some troubleshooting and help from the Ubuntu forums (http://www.ubuntuforums.org), but I got there! In Vista, I'd partitioned another 40 gb just for Ubuntu (still leaving about 350gb un-allocated); in Ubuntu, when installing, I chose manual, then had to partition the still-unallocated space to make a swap file (I went for 3bg, but that's a bit big); then I went to the 40gb partition and chose to format it in ext3 (Ubuntu's default), selecting '/' as the mount point.
Everything worked out great, none of my other partitions was affected, and I even found it very easy to configure my much-newer nVidea Geforce 9600! I'm running dual 19" wide-screen monitors the way I want them, and even have my Japanese input working perfectly!
Welcome back, Ubuntu!
Screen shot of Ubuntu 8.10 - Intrepid Ibex: the left is my 'extra' monitor, and right is my main screen.
My main screen, with my Fire Fox start screen!
PS: Oh, I did buy a new (cheap) case for all the old parts of my pc, and managed to rebuild a pretty good machine - 3.0 gigahertz, 240 gb hard drives, 4 gigs of ram, Geforce 5200 graphics card, a DVD/CD reader/writer, multi-card read... All with left-overs! And I also just sold that machine to a friend - most excellent!
2 comments:
It's hilarious that your rebuild machine from old parts is about twice as powerful as my desktop! How is the dual boot working for you? How are you booting with Wubi?
My old parts were actually pretty good, I guess. The buyer is happy, anyway!
As for Wubi - no, I installed the OS as an OS on it's own partition. I nearly gave up and did the Wubi, since it looks so easy and I heard it runs just as well as a pure install...
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