Use the links after each section or scroll.
Installed Ubuntu 10.10 to /dev/hda3 which had an aborted Debian 5 install that failed before it could install X11. I did the initial install into the 7 GB partition that was there because the instller wouldn't resize it. I got a good base system but because the partition was mounted, since it is the root, I couldn't resize it with gparted. I had added a couple of my favorite packages. The install had already updated packages it installed from the software sources. I already know that I have to find an unsupported package, CQview. Havn't found it yet. It does the easiest job of showing if two images are identical.
I installed emacs, and the default fixed-width sans-serif font is a little better than was in the last install. I checked out graphics intensive programs like Celestia and they seemed to do OK. There was not complaiint about the Nvidia card, despite the fact that there has been driver problems in the past.
TopA Partition to be resized by Gnome Partition Editor (gparted) must be unmounted, so one uses the utility from the Live DVD image. I was able to resize the Windows partition and grow this partition to more than 40 GB. This took over an hour. It changed the partiton table and moved the files to the new top of the filesystem and fsck'ed the ext4 filesysten. Obviously the move worked, at least for the linux filesystems and Grub did the right thing. The only thing I havn't yet done is to boot Vista and be sure that the NTFS filesystem is happy, but I am confident that it is fine, that is all the data is safe, because I had tried to defrag it and it didn't need to be defraged, so the free space was contiguous and was reallocated without any major risk to NTFS although I expect Vista to complain a bit when it notices that the size of its filesystem has changed, like before. Vista did a cjdisk and booted fine after that.
TopA requirement for a Linux install is the ability to live along side other OS installs, usually a Windows and also other Linux and BSD systems. This is achieved by using a boot loader that is addressed by the Master Boot Record of the first disk. When I installed Ubuntu 10.10 all this worked fine, but after I did recomended updates I found that the boot menu had been replaced by entries that only used the Ubuntu 10.10 install. The program that does this is Grub2, which changed the boot silantly. Although all of the systems are still there, I can't use them, or I havn't figured how to do it manually.
I opened a question on the support forums and in a week's time have not heard of a way to fix this. The reason I am concerned is that in the last install of Linux I found that it couldn't repair a corrupt NTFS filesystem and that I had to boot into Vista to check it. The filesystem has needed to be fixed about three times.
TopWith advice from the community I was able to resolve the bootloader problem arrising from a recommended upgrade of a freshly installed Ubuntu 10.10 system. It had lost the pointers to other boot images on the disk. This was solved by recreating the device map file by using probe-os. Someone mentioned this early in the exchange, but I couldn't find that program, finally, I learned that I could get it from the software repository and once I got it I could recreate the file and reconfigure grub. I was able to get grub to find all the other boot images and tested by rebooting all four systems I have on the disk, Vista, Wubi ( U 9.04), the old Ubuntu 9.04 install that is no longer supported, and the new Ubuntu 10.10 that is, which I am using now.
I had GQview on the old Ubuntu install, and it had the feature I liked that if you want to move an image to replace an image of the same name it shows you the original and source images as thumbnails side-by-side. This feature is appearently missing from the version supported on the new Ubuntu. The old bersion is 2.04 and either I will have to install it on the new system, even from source, or ask the developer to port the above feature to the new version.
Top