Windows 7 dual boot with 8.10?

[sXeChris]

Hi, I am a student that has ordinarily used Windows since a very young age. I will officially start my career in I.T. in about 3 years and it is now that I am starting to take interest in learning about other operating systems - such as Ubuntu. I currently have Windows 7 32-bit on a partition and would like to install Ubuntu 8.10 (because I have a book that was originally my father's called Ubuntu 8.10 bible and I'm planning on making this my base of study for Ubuntu).

What would I have to do to successfully install 8.10 on another partition? I understand there are some problems with GRUB or something like that, I don't think I would be able to normally install it on another partition, like if it were just another operating system. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

[frantid]

There are plenty of dual boot tutorials on the net. These examples are my favorite:

http://members.iinet.net/~herman546/index.html

[snowpine]

Welcome to the forums! I think you will find Ubuntu is a great operating system and will teach you valuable skills. That being said, the 8.10 release has reached its "end of life." That means it is no longer supported and any learning you do with it will be obsolete. :( I would highly recommend installing the current release, 10.04 Lucid Lynx, instead, as it will be supported for 3 years.

There are some great how-tos at this page; (http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/index) you do not necessarily need to create a separate partition to try Ubuntu! :)

[oldfred]

One of my ME design Professors recommended marking up the design book with updated and/or additional information as we learn more thru our career.

That is why my Ubuntu 6.06 book has many comments/notes with extra explanation and a few full printed pages added in. Much of that information came from others on this forum or links provided here to other sites. I now have so many extra pages that I have a directory of info that I have saved.

Some things have changed since 8.10 but a lot is still the same. I would still use the book, check that the liveCD of the current version works and install that. Look in the forums or other sites for additional/updated information if your book is not up to date on some of the details.

[snowpine]

I am not saying you should throw the book in the trash :) as many of the core concepts are the same from release to release. Nevertheless, Ubuntu is a fast-moving distro, and most of its releases are only supported for 18 months. Ubuntu 8.10 is obsolete and no longer officially supported in any way (in fact you can't even easily upgrade from 8.10 to the current release). You will not get bug fixes, you will not get security patches, and you will not even be able to install new applications from the repositories (as they have been closed). So please, install a currently-supported release such as 10.04. :)

Among the many important changes since 8.10 include: Grub 2 replaces Grub as the bootloader, ext4 replaces ext3 as the default filesystem, Pulseaudio completely replaces Alsa, and Xorg.conf ceases to exist.

Your first sources of information should always be the release notes, ubuntu.com help documentation, official wiki, and these forums. It is impossible for any print publication to stay abreast of the frequent and constant changes in Ubuntu. However, these forums are the best resource anywhere. Ask lots of questions and carefully weigh the different answers you receive; you'll learn a lot. :)

[sXeChris]

Snowpine, thank you for your input. You're very right about 8.10 not being supported and the better alternative being 10.04. I decided I'll stay with 8.10 for a bit just to get a taste of Ubuntu and then I'll move on to 10.04. Up to now, it's been a great experience since the beginning and I'm loving it already. Thanks for visiting my post.