meissen
October 12th, 2006, 05:00 PM
Hi guys,
Just wanted to throw a post up, I've visited the site so much in the past 72 hours it's rediculous. I started out reading a thread on Notebookreview.com about Dual Booting with WinXP and Ubuntu. I once tried SuSe on a seperate PC, but found myself using my regular PC more than this test machine and gave up. Dual boot seemed to be the way to go, be able to use my laptop and still have both WinXP for my necessary items, and Ubuntu to play around with.
I've grown up using Windows, as far back as I can remember (I'm only 20, so it's not THAT long ago!) I was using Win3.11, then Win95, Win98, and then lastly WinXP. It's all that I've known, and I would call myself a "Poweruser" that leans towards the excitement of trying something new.
Anyway, on the site I was reading they referenced this site for how-to and tutorials and I came over here and read what I could about partitioning and what not, setting up the dual boot, and decided to go for it. I defragged my harddrive until I only had 0.13% fragmentation (only 3 fragmented files, w00t! Window's built-in defrag tool said it wasn't necessary to defrag at about 14% fragmentation) and then went ahead with the install. The tutorial I read for partitioning was using the LiveCD's built-in partition tool. So, I went ahead and resized my main Windows partition, moved one partition over so it was where the resized Win partition was, then created my Linux partitions and hit "Next"
Failure! Oh ****, I hit back to view the partitions and my main partition was !Unknown. :( :( I restarted the machine and booted to hard disk but alas it was unmountable boot device and didn't want to boot. By that point, it was either wait a few days until I had the time to trouble shoot it or just dive into Ubuntu. So, with MUCH hesitation (6 years of personal files... of course, none of it backed up recently!) I went ahead and reformatted the harddrive and installed Ubuntu.
That was Monday, so far I've switched to KDE (Feels more like Windows, I must admit you can take the WinXP out of the user but taking the familiarity of a Start menu and bottom taskbar out of the user is harder), installed 3dDesk, installed a handful of the free apps, and so far I'm still battling that learning curve. It's much harder after being so accustomed to Windows and knowing Windows inside and out (afterall, I'm a Desktop Support Technician for a company with over 1000 windows PCs) but it hasn't been TOO difficult. Some aspects (as I've seen in other threads) are definitely not "Average Joe / Beginner" friendly, but it's not too bad.
Anyway, just thought I'd post some up a positive experience with getting acclimated into the Ubuntu world. It's been less than a week and I feel like I have much more to do to get it how I want it, but I can definitely see myself getting used to Ubuntu (maybe with VMware running WinXP Pro? ;) ) and spreading the good word of the OS.
Lastly, thanks for having such a great site with so much information available to read! The How-To section is absolutely stunning with how much knowledgebase is there on customizing and installing programs. I haven't had to venture into the other forums (yet) but I know if I run into a problem that I'll find the answer here. Thanks guys!!!
Just wanted to throw a post up, I've visited the site so much in the past 72 hours it's rediculous. I started out reading a thread on Notebookreview.com about Dual Booting with WinXP and Ubuntu. I once tried SuSe on a seperate PC, but found myself using my regular PC more than this test machine and gave up. Dual boot seemed to be the way to go, be able to use my laptop and still have both WinXP for my necessary items, and Ubuntu to play around with.
I've grown up using Windows, as far back as I can remember (I'm only 20, so it's not THAT long ago!) I was using Win3.11, then Win95, Win98, and then lastly WinXP. It's all that I've known, and I would call myself a "Poweruser" that leans towards the excitement of trying something new.
Anyway, on the site I was reading they referenced this site for how-to and tutorials and I came over here and read what I could about partitioning and what not, setting up the dual boot, and decided to go for it. I defragged my harddrive until I only had 0.13% fragmentation (only 3 fragmented files, w00t! Window's built-in defrag tool said it wasn't necessary to defrag at about 14% fragmentation) and then went ahead with the install. The tutorial I read for partitioning was using the LiveCD's built-in partition tool. So, I went ahead and resized my main Windows partition, moved one partition over so it was where the resized Win partition was, then created my Linux partitions and hit "Next"
Failure! Oh ****, I hit back to view the partitions and my main partition was !Unknown. :( :( I restarted the machine and booted to hard disk but alas it was unmountable boot device and didn't want to boot. By that point, it was either wait a few days until I had the time to trouble shoot it or just dive into Ubuntu. So, with MUCH hesitation (6 years of personal files... of course, none of it backed up recently!) I went ahead and reformatted the harddrive and installed Ubuntu.
That was Monday, so far I've switched to KDE (Feels more like Windows, I must admit you can take the WinXP out of the user but taking the familiarity of a Start menu and bottom taskbar out of the user is harder), installed 3dDesk, installed a handful of the free apps, and so far I'm still battling that learning curve. It's much harder after being so accustomed to Windows and knowing Windows inside and out (afterall, I'm a Desktop Support Technician for a company with over 1000 windows PCs) but it hasn't been TOO difficult. Some aspects (as I've seen in other threads) are definitely not "Average Joe / Beginner" friendly, but it's not too bad.
Anyway, just thought I'd post some up a positive experience with getting acclimated into the Ubuntu world. It's been less than a week and I feel like I have much more to do to get it how I want it, but I can definitely see myself getting used to Ubuntu (maybe with VMware running WinXP Pro? ;) ) and spreading the good word of the OS.
Lastly, thanks for having such a great site with so much information available to read! The How-To section is absolutely stunning with how much knowledgebase is there on customizing and installing programs. I haven't had to venture into the other forums (yet) but I know if I run into a problem that I'll find the answer here. Thanks guys!!!