[Solatar]

I got a laptop a few months ago, and I'm interested in running XP and Linux on it. Hoping some of you can help.

It's a Dell laptop (inspiron 1520). I managed to get it new with XP instead of Vista, which is accomplishment number 1. I've got an Ubuntu install CD lying around (it's older, version 5.10) and since I've got a 120Gb hardrive, I want to try to install it.

I'm currently defragmenting the hardrive (which is not partitioned), and I was just wondering if it was as simple as putting in the CD and following the on screen instructions for formatting, etc., or if I should know a few things so I don't break it.

I'd rather not lose my install of XP and files in the process, but I have no real way of backing any of it up. I also have everything I need to completely wipe the hardrive and reinstall XP if I screw it up THAT bad.

[Pyro MX]

If you run Windows XP and doing a defrag right now, you have a partitioned hard drive. 

Installing Ubuntu is as easy as following the steps... carefully. Don't go push "next" 'till the end, you might have some surprises. The most critical part of the installation process is disk partionning. You'll probably have to resize your Windows partition to let some space for Ubuntu - don't worry, it shouldn't be hard to do so. As far as I can remember, it's all done via a really simple GUI. The amount of space you let for the 2 partitions is up to you.

Little tip: have a solid root password and if you have difficulties remembering it, write it down somewhere on a paper. And be sure that you have the correct keyboard layout. Because if you loose your root password, you're pretty much screwed for everything that needs administrative tasks.  (Experienced this once. Trust me, you don't want to re-install everything just because of a keyboard layout confusion)

Ubuntu is pretty easy to install - not to say a joke. If you are unsure about anything specific, there's always the documentation and the community to help you.

[Solatar]

I'm installing it (erasing XP) on an old POS eMachines desktop I had lying around just so I'll get the hang of it, but the disk partitioning part was what had me worried.

And yeah, I meant that I had only one partition, not that I didn't have any.

But the Ubuntu partitioner will work for me? I don't have to do anything in windows to "prepare" it? Was just making sure I could resize my windows partition from the Ubuntu installation.

[Pyro MX]

Ubuntu installer's disk partitioner will do all the job - nothing has to be done in XP for partitioning.

[Solatar]

Alright, going ahead and doing it then as soon as this defrag finishes up. Thanks for your help.

[Hellstryker]

Whats so great about linux anyway? :noob:

[achtung]

What's so great about Windows anyway?

[Nx]

Alright, going ahead and doing it then as soon as this defrag finishes up. Thanks for your help.

I hope your not installing 5.10. You should really download a newer version, 5.10 is more than 2 years old.

[captain-custard]

ok 2 things,
as said in the previous post your ubuntoo is old,

so your going to have to download a new one

i dual boot as well, using xp, ubuntoo and pc linux( which is on a 2.5" external drive)

before u start use your xp disc and cut ur drive into two partitions, format one nfts for windows and leave the other one blank for some reason ubuntoo will instal easier and you can see in the partition tool which is which, personaly ill think you will find in a very short amount of time your going to be stuck for disk space,with yor 120gb hard drive youll be left with 2 partitions of 55gb, one will be cut in 3 by linux( 7.5gb, 4gb, 43.5gb)

so after you run out of space get a little 2.5" 160gb drive this will cost all of 80$ weather there american or euro ones.......

cut this in half and format 50gb on nfts and the other in ext 3 , download ifs drives this will alow windows to read write to the ext section and you will never need to defrag it, with the nfts put a program files folder there and you can install games etc in there and as long as its plugged in it will work...................


please read post below , i meant to say ext 2 oooops

[Nx]

ok 2 things,
as said in the previous post your ubuntoo is old,

so your going to have to download a new one

i dual boot as well, using xp, ubuntoo and pc linux( which is on a 2.5" external drive)

before u start use your xp disc and cut ur drive into two partitions, format one nfts for windows and leave the other one blank for some reason ubuntoo will instal easier and you can see in the partition tool which is which, personaly ill think you will find in a very short amount of time your going to be stuck for disk space,with yor 120gb hard drive youll be left with 2 partitions of 55gb, one will be cut in 3 by linux( 7.5gb, 4gb, 43.5gb)

so after you run out of space get a little 2.5" 160gb drive this will cost all of 80$ weather there american or euro ones.......

cut this in half and format 50gb on nfts and the other in ext 3 , download ifs drives this will alow windows to read write to the ext section and you will never need to defrag it, with the nfts put a program files folder there and you can install games etc in there and as long as its plugged in it will work...................

He said he doesn't want to lose his windows install, so reformatting is not an option. The installer can resize the ntfs partition, but backups are recommended.
I don't know the default values for partitions, but I always use manual partitioning. In that case, 9Gb for root (where you install all your programs) should be enough (7.5 is not if you start installing lots of applications), 1Gb for swap and the rest for /home.

IFS drives treats your ext3 partition as an ext2, so if you write to it, the next time you boot ubuntu it will have to do an fsck on boot (sort of like scandisk). If you don't unmount your ext3 partition cleanly (i.e. normal shutdown), and then use ext2 on it, YOU MAY LOSE DATA. Otherwise, there's no risk of data loss, it's just annoying.
Also, it fragments the drive, and there's no easy way to defragment ext3.

[S-99]

Don't install ubuntu. You're best bet is to go with pclinuxos or mepis or just go with pure debian if you feel adventurous. Ubuntu sometimes has a good release, most of the time not. Pclinuxos is waay better than ubuntu anyday, i'd shove that on the laptop. Ubuntu nooooooo!!!

[Kazan]

Whats so great about linux anyway? :noob:

1) it actually has security
2) it comes with free software that would cost you thousands of dollars on a windows machine
3) it actually has security
4) it is open source so fixes and upgrades come quickly
5) it's immune to most viruses... because it has security - when it does have a virus vulnerability (security hole) it's fixed very quickly
6) it has better performance on the same hardware
7) it's much more customizable
...

list goes on

[edit]
and don't do ubuntu or any .deb based... get Fedora 8 or even one fo the prereleases of Fedora 9

[Nx]

Whats so great about linux anyway? :noob:

1) it actually has security
2) it comes with free software that would cost you thousands of dollars on a windows machine
3) it actually has security
4) it is open source so fixes and upgrades come quickly
5) it's immune to most viruses... because it has security - when it does have a virus vulnerability (security hole) it's fixed very quickly
6) it has better performance on the same hardware
7) it's much more customizable
...

list goes on

[edit]
and don't do ubuntu or any .deb based... get Fedora 8 or even one fo the prereleases of Fedora 9

Prerelease versions should not be used as a primary working environment even if you're an experienced user. Fedora 9 isn't even in feature freeze, which means they are still adding features and not fixing bugs. For example, gvfs (replacement for the old gnome virtual filesystem abstraction layer) is targeted for both Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9 (both coming out in April), but the Ubuntu developers are considering not activating it by default, because of risk of data loss. And here we're talking about an unfinished version in a prerelease distro.

Edit: read this thread so you know what I mean.

[Pyro MX]

Heh last Fedora I tried was Fedora Core 2 - switched to Ubuntu, which worked really fine for me, then went to Kubuntu, didn't like KDE very much after a year with it. Now I'm on Gentoo.

I think that Ubuntu is a good distro - it's easy to install, has lots of apps available in their tree (and maybe I'm wrong here, correct me if I'm wrong, but although the distro is not as stable as Debian, it gets new versions of applications way faster unless you fall into the testing branch).

[achtung]

I'm using Fedora 8.  The Anaconda installer is great, the repos are well-stocked, and I've had 0 stability issues.

[S-99]

and don't do ubuntu or any .deb based... get Fedora 8 or even one fo the prereleases of Fedora 9

What so  bad abou debian based disros? They're a lot easier to use than redhat distros. Just that when getting something debian based, stay far away from ubuntu. And acttually debian is way better than redhat. Debian has 19000 packages in it's repositories. That's a lot more and more handy than redhat's 7000 or so. When you don't have so many packages to choose from in the repositories of your distro, then that's when you usually have to install something from outside of the repositories that you couldn't find in the repos. In which debs are a lot better than rpms in that case.

I would be trying out fedora at the moment, but it's got the network-manager nightmare package. I stuck with using pclinuxos for messing around with an rpm based distro (an rpm distro done right).

[Hellstryker]

lol... im going to end up tri booting xp 32 xp 64 and linux if you keep convincing me to get it

[asyikarea51]

WHAT?!

And here I thought Ubuntu was more worth it. Oh well, too late.

I did try PCLinuxOS beforehand (nice appearance too), plenty of base apps on stock install, plus my sound worked right out of the live CD (after 1 or 2 later boots with that disc though) unlike the Xubuntu I just got. Still having unsolved trouble with the ALSA drivers even with the install perfectly fine and the output options visible in whatever media players I use. And the volume turned up to full.

So I got fed up and switched to OSSv4.

What exactly does Ubuntu fare poorly at if I may ask? Apart from not being able to open .rar files that is...

(p.s. I come from Windows trying to see what's the fuss all about - I know very little about the politics and other technical jargon surrounding Linux itself...)

[Nx]

WHAT?!

And here I thought Ubuntu was more worth it. Oh well, too late.

I did try PCLinuxOS beforehand (nice appearance too), plenty of base apps on stock install, plus my sound worked right out of the live CD (after 1 or 2 later boots with that disc though) unlike the Xubuntu I just got. Still having unsolved trouble with the ALSA drivers even with the install perfectly fine and the output options visible in whatever media players I use. And the volume turned up to full.

So I got fed up and switched to OSSv4.

What exactly does Ubuntu fare poorly at if I may ask? Apart from not being able to open .rar files that is...

(p.s. I come from Windows trying to see what's the fuss all about - I know very little about the politics and other technical jargon surrounding Linux itself...)

Enable the multiverse repository and install unrar from there. The free (as in speech) version that's included by default can't handle the newer version of the rar format.

[asyikarea51]

Now I have no idea as to why I installed p7zip for... but both don't even have executables to start or something? Am I just installing libraries?

Whatever I did to my install, I can extract the files out but I can't actually open the archive itself to see the contents beforehand (i.e. like in Windows using WinRAR or 7zip).

Ah well.