I was online tonight and after reading a couple of articles and thinking about this for some time now, I have decided to install Ubuntu on my home computer and dual boot it with my XP that lives there now. I should have done this as a play-by-play blog entry but I think after an hour, I can catch you up.
10:15pm-ish: Burned Ubuntu disc onto CD and shut down computer to boot from CD.
10:20pm-ish: After turning on the computer, it boots straight to XP without regard to the disc sitting in its drive. I wonder how this is…
10:22pm-ish: Changed boot.ini file to have just the default info according to Microsoft’s site. Shut down
10:23pm-ish: XP immediately boots up. YAY!!!!! I’m beginning to wonder what’s going on.
10:45pm-ish: After several changes to the boot.ini file followed by several shut downs, I have no clue. Keeps booting directly to XP. There is no stopping it. I add this “/REDIRECT” to my boot.ini and…
10:46pm-ish: Not sure if it was the “/REDIRECT” or me randomly pushing F-keys while the boot happened but I got to the BIOS info. I can’t see anything in there that specifies booting from the CD drive. I’m not an expert in this at all but I thought it was right there. Ended up not doing anything.
11:00pm-ish: More restarts and more XP screens. Starting writing this down now.
11:20pm: Finally found it buried in the BIOS. BTW, if you push F8, F11, F12, and DELETE, one of those opens the BIOS. Good for me to know.
11:24pm: I have seen the Ubuntu install screen. Happiness is here finally.
11:27pm: The OS seems to be loading. I am answering the questions as to where I am and how I want my drive partitioned.
11:29pm: Used default partition and it took about 10 seconds.
11:31pm: I am asked if I would like to import any accounts from my Windows login. This is really cool. I pick my browser settings for IE and FF and move on.
11:33pm: I have to say that this is pretty easy. I get a “Ready to Install” window. Cool.
11:34pm: Official start time. Let’s see how long this actually takes.
11:44pm: Install done and restarting computer. I hope this works.
11:47pm: I am loading Ubuntu now and am very happy that I finally got this to work.
11:50pm: Downloading and installing updates. Everything seems to be working. I can connect to the internet perfectly. This has been a really easy process once I got past the initial “How to boot from a CD” fiasco.
I’ll have more to come once I get a change to bounce around in here.
UPDATE - I got it installed and everything working. I went to check to make sure XP would load correctly and it did perfectly. I did receive a hardware found message that I read I would see. It finished what it needed to do and did a reboot. This is where the trouble started for me. Upon the load, I see a GRUB Error 17 (or something to that matter) on the screen and nothing happens. It just stopped in its tracks. I push the power button to shut it down and start it back up and same thing. It will boot Ubuntu with the disc in but no Windows. I read online that I need to put something called SuperGrubDisk so I go to its site and get an ISO for a bootable disc. Thing is, my Ubuntu CD that I have in the box won’t come out because it’s running the OS currently. So I’ll burn it from another computer and load it tonight when I get home. But as of now, my computer is a nice paper weight.
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7 Users Responded in " Installing Ubuntu on an XP Box "
I’m glad Ubuntu was so easy for you to install. Do I understand correctly that everything went fine until you booted into XP and that made some change in your boot process, hosing up GRUB? That really sucks. I’ll see if I can find something to help you.
Hey Daniel - It was really easy. But my problem I believe was that I installed it onto my 2nd hard disk rather than the first disk. I tried un-installing it last night and couldn’t. I also tried to resize my C partition on my first disk as it takes the entire disk but somehow that didn’t work either. I won’t be able to work on it tonight (MUSE concert
) but I will hopefully get it working normally soon.
Thanks for your help with this.
What happened to your website design?
I upgraded to WP 2.3 and forgot that I had renamed the theme I was using to default because it always resets itself. Should be fixed now.
I assume getting a system to dual boot is not that simple. You need to partition your disk right and need to have grub running on it which should give you the dual boot options. Ubuntu forums have a lot of help on this. check them out…
You might also want to take a look at your site… seems to be very slow and locks down scrolling very often.. have experienced it with FF and IE… wanted to comment on your iTouch V IPhone blog as well.. but do not have the patience
Shikhar - I am still working on getting it set up correctly. I have heard that is has to do with the fact that I set Ubuntu up on my secondary hard disk and it really likes the first one. I have tried to remove it but being very hesitant because I can’t find it at all on my Windows Explorer.
As for the site being slow, I apologize for that. I noticed it like that at my work but thought it was my work connection but apparently not. I’ll try to play around with some things and hopefully you won’t have that issue again.
What was your comment on the iTouch versus the iPhone? I’m curious to hear it.
Thanks for reading.
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