I recently had reason to re-install Ubuntu Linux on my desktop PC, and thought I would write a little about my experiences, and how things have changed since the last time I had need to do this.
My Hardware:
- ASUS P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard (ICH7-R)
- 2x Corsair XMS PC5400 sticks
- Hitachi 160GB HDT722516DLA380 SATA HDD
- Western Digital WD3200KS 320GB SATA HDD
- ASUS NVIDIA 7900GT, 256MB PCI-e graphics card
- Few various other unimportant bits
As usual, the ISO image finished downloading in a few minutes, got burnt, and I booted into the LiveCD environment, and started the install process (It detected my iPod in the LiveCD environment, but kind of useless since the necessary plugins for MP3 support aren’t installed at that stage).
I had a pre-existing Windows Vista NTFS partition on the 160GB OS drive, I resized it to 70GB without issue (I’ll never get used to that, I remember the days when anything involving NTFS writes invariably meant data loss when used from Linux).
Likewise on the 320GB data drive, I split things 50/50 between Windows & Linux, the resize again transpiring without issue.
After that, it was simply a matter of playing Gnometris and surfing until the installation was complete (Again something other operating systems could learn from).
Reboot, the familiar GRUB menu, select Ubuntu, and wait for GDM to come up (I am not sure that I like “silent” bootup style, I’d prefer that the graphical progress screen shows the text messages of the init scripts when they run).
The easy part done, then.
