Moving to Ubuntu: Part three

After spending an eternity defragging my hard drive, I was ready to try installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty). I really don't know why the Windows Defragmenter needs so many goes to properly defragment the drive - if I was doing this again I would research a third party Defragmenter.

I popped in the install/Live CD and booted the computer. Once the computer had booted into the CD, I selected the install option. You are presented with a number of simple questions regarding your locale. Then you get to the partition section. As I wanted to keep my existing XP installation so I can Dual Boot, I selected the option to manually edit the partition table.

I resized the existing Windows partition down to 15GB (after the cleanup and defrag, it was using 9GB). I created the required root and swap partitions, but I also created a /home partition. The home partition is where your user settings/files reside. The advantage of a separate home partition is that if you ever need to re-install the Operating System, your data remains intact in the home partition.

Once the partitioning was finished the install began. I had read that it can take up to an hour, but was pleasantly surprised to find it only took 15 minutes to install on my PC. You are then prompted to remove the CD so the system can reboot and start properly from the install.

This is the moment of truth - would the system recognise both the Ubuntu and XP installation? Yes it did. I selected the Ubuntu installation and it proceeded to start up. It forced a disk check during the start up, and found an error. This was a bit worrying. It then restarted after correcting the error and this time booted up OK. Phew! My new system was up and running. I then shut it down to test if I could still boot into XP OK. This also worked. It was then back into Ubuntu to stat installing some software!

The only problem I found (so far) was after I installed Google Earth. The rendering was very jumpy and not smooth at all. This was quite easy to fix - I needed to activate the restricted ATI graphics driver for my graphics card from the Restricted Drivers menu item.

I've still got a few things to setup and install, but so far it is looking good. And it runs really quickly too. I checked the memory consumption out of interest in the System Monitor and it was around 250MB - my XP installation would generally be around 400-500MB with a similar set of applications running. Make of that what you will.