Here’s a quick rundown on Ubuntu Desktop Alternate install. It starts at the partitoning since I beleive this is the point when most peple say “what the fuck?” .. lol
Images speak a thousand words:
Manual is my choice
Guided – use entire disk: will walk you through the install too, but assumes you will use one ext3 and one swap and what ever other OS you have on there.
Select disc to partition
Once you’ve selected your disc, I hammer down “Return” and it asks me if “I’m sure”.
If it is your only hdd/os wipe it
In this case it was saying “This is an unformatted disc, we need to get it set up to partition” .. so I did.
Freshly wiped hdd
This frame should start looking kind of familure. You may see SDA/SDB/SDC the sd is the device and the sdA,sdB,sdC are the devices. If you had 3 hdd in your computer you would see sda through sdc. In this case we’ve only got one hdd (sda) so we are going to make three partitions in here (if you already have Windows installed you’ll see sda1 already). We are going to make sda1, 2 & 3. If you have windows already you’ll make sda2,3 &4. More on windows ‘crap’ later.
Select create new partition
Create a new partition. Do not click the partition your windows is installed on just yet. I’ll shoot you some screenshots for that in a bit.
Size your part up
Back space that size out and enter your own size. In this case I backed up and entered “512MB” and hit enter. This was for my /boot partition.
This is the finished look
I entered ext3 for /boot (/boot or grub can only do ext3, ext2 and reiserfs) and changed the Bootable flag: to on. If you already have windows installed this will reamain off.
All done
This is my finished partition table for an all Ubuntu install. For windows it would look similar, except that sda1 (#1 primary) would be “#1 primary xx.x GB B f NTFS /media/WinSux_XP” followed by the Ubuntu partitions. I do similar partitions for Gentoo, Debian, FreeBSD and gOS.
Last Chance
If you see a windows partition in the section that says “The following partitions are going to be formatted:” then it WILL erase all your virus magnet area with what ever it says here. In this instance it is all just the stuff I selected.
Six percent
After your partitions finish writing it will jump into the base install (all the stuff it needs to really install). It is natorious to look like it “stuck” at 6% but it is usually just unzipping (for a lack of better word) the files it needs to continue. It’ll stop here for a while (10 minutes or more sometimes).
This is Ubuntu alt install cd started from a windows virtualbox inside my Ubuntu box. If it were “reality” you’d see more than 8.2mb down there to mess with, but we’ll chop it once more for example.
Select free
We only have 8.2mb to dink’ with, but this will give you an idea.
sorta
Basically you can see here. The bootable disc (B under GB) is still for the Windows partition, but we’ve still got /boot where Ubuntu will store it’s startup files. Grub will change the MBR (Master Boot Record) so it will use Grub (in /boot/grub) to start the computer, then offer a menu so you can select the OS you wanna play with.
Something I always do (but know what I’m doing) is to click the windows partition, and change it’s mount location. I usually change it to /media/WinSux_ExPee or something along those lines. That way it shows up on my desktop as such. Just do not format it, you’ll loose that stuff.
After Ubuntu is all installed I also go toss a buttload of other stuff on there. Mainly virtualbox (& how to) medibuntu, playdeb and uncleck the blocked repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list (sudo gedit (or nano -w) /etc/apt/sources.list). I like to watch my purchased DVD movies on the hardware I paid for (DRM is such a rip off to the consumer).
That’s a foot in the door I guess. Hope it doesn’t seem too bad, it’s cake really.
Justin =)
