damn that was easy

The part that took me a long time when I last tried to put Linux on my laptop was figuring out how to do a non-destructive repartitioning. I wish I remembered exactly how I did it but I was successful and I didn't lose any data. Anyway.. I still had a couple 10gb partitions and a half gig swap directory available. For people that may want to do this here is what I remember give yourself as much swap as you have RAM and the rest of the partitioning is just how you feel comfortable with organizing it. on this computer where I have a bit over 20 gigs dedicated to Linux I split the 20 gigs in half. making 10g the root (/) and 10g the home (/home/) I figured that as I'm figuring out this whole Linux thing I'll leave windows available on the other 50g and when I am sure I am past the point of needing it I'll reformat the entire computer with some other partition scheme.

Here is my favorite thing about Ubuntu so far. When I threw in the image I burned to CD it immediately booted to a usable gnome (one of the two major Linux graphical user interfaces) and it did a great job detecting my hardware. This was even better than my experience with knoppix live (which I used to steal setting for my old mythbox when fedora coudlnt figure it out). On the desktop there was an "Install" icon that I assumed installed the OS on the harddrive if you were not a big fan of the whole live CD idea.

The install was absurdly simple. All it asked me was my keyboard layout, timezone and which partitions I wanted to install on. As I mentioned earlier, I had existing partitions to use so I didn't have to deal with the joy of partitioning.

Next thing I knew the computer was restarting and it was shoving the install CD back at me telling me it wasn't needed anymore. it adjusted the grub bootloader that was still on the laptop from the Debian install I attempted about a year ago (and have been ignoring since) so I chose ubuntu and it went right to a functioning GUI that I am currently writing this blog in.

One of the first things that it did was tell me there were 170 something updates. Blind user I am.. I said hell yeah, I trust you computer do all your updates. about 20 minutes and then requested another restart. My only complaint about this entire process (and it is one I believe I can fix by editing the grub config file) is that when it rebooted after the updates I had two copies of each the ubuntu choices (the regular 686 and the safe mode one)...

So after the default install and doing nothing special, here is the status of my laptop as I know it:

Gnome works wonderfully with it's desktop default packages
My wired lan card works well but the wireless the intel internal 2200BG (I think? it took me almost a month to get the wireless card working in debian (sarge) and I had to know the driver name then)
my laptop is a wide screen 14"... something like 1280x 738.. well everything looks stretched so it looks like it failed to figure out the correct resolution...
The trackpad seems to work flawlessly (I meant to mention that I noticed this during my previous attempt: the trackpad seems to be more responsive and accurate under Linux than under windows.. it's sweet).
also, I had all kinds of fun installing a battery icon in Debian KDE... in ubuntu gnome there appears to be a working battery meter by default.
um.. That's all I can think of right now and I have just left like 4 entries... so... I'll update you when my computer is updated. my goal is to tell you all those things that you never can seem to find googling the problem.. (you'd think that you were the first one to ever get that error when you are attempting to follow some online guide...)
buybuy