Before I decided to install linux on my new laptop, I decided to check out how the Ubuntu live CD worked. After getting a black screen during boot, I found this thread about what to do to get it running. I followed the instructions and it was running smoothly.

Moving forward with installing linux in a dual-boot configuration, I decided to split up the 80GB hard drive into 3 partitions. I’ve been using Acronis Disk Director for a while and it’s a swell disk management tool. First, I shrunk the monolithic NTFS partition to 25GB, created a second partition that will be used for linux that was about 10GB and with the remaining ~35GB, I created a FAT32 partition that will be used as a shared partition between the systems. I left the hidden “restore” partitions alone for now.

Next, I downloaded g4u, but that failed to recognize my laptop’s network card, so I tried g4l (Ghost for Linux). It allows you to create an image and upload it to an ftp site in one command. So I created an FTP site on my desktop, which has plenty of space to store the image and started the image creation process. So far, it’s been running for about 1 hour 45 minutes and it’s about 90% done.

Tomorrow, I’ll try to install Ubuntu.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 28th, 2006 at 12:46 am and is filed under laptop, linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.