[lug] Re: Ubuntu 5.10 on Toshiba Satellite L25

On 12/4/05, J-Rod <jerrad.brown@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm a bit new to linux, so please be forgiving. As of recently, I've
> chosen Ubuntu as my flavor of choice. I'm running WinXP Pro for now on

Ubuntu is a nice distro. I perfer Kubuntu myself (can't stand gnome)
but it's a really good distro as far as desktop users are concerned.

> this laptop, I'm wanting to install Ubuntu on a partition so I could
> run both OSs. I'd like to eventually migrate it to linux and leave my

Very logical. It's far easier than you might think - if you have a
little bit of computer savvy under your belt.

> PC running windows, but I don't know enough to save myself if I screw
> anything up on linux. I've made the install disk for Ubuntu 5.10. It

Well, since you're running XP Pro, your drive is probably formatted in
NTFS. I can't get Linux to read my NTFS partition on my laptop ATM (I
haven't tried that hard yet - no one should get alarmed) but AFAIK
Linux will not destroy other partitions unless you're really working
hard at it. Linux is outrageously stable, and I've never actually
crashed it in my life. I've gotten X Server to do some funky stuff,
but the actual system... never.

As for your situation... What's the make and model of your laptop.
If you want to dual-boot without killing windows, you'll need to
"shrink" the existing windows partition - given that you have the free
space on the said partition. I'm lazy, and there was some weird IBM
rescue and recovery patition on my laptop (a grand total of 4 gigs) so
I killed that and made it the linux partition without so much as
touching windows at all. However, you might not have that little
thing on your laptop, so more knowledge is required.

> gets to the boot screen, I hit Enter, everything starts. It loads some
> drivers and mounts the temp file system (I think...) and then dies.
> Everything just stops, my fan might kick on for a second or two, but
> thats about it. It sits on this black screen and does nothing. I've
> installed Ubuntu on a blank hard drive and I installed it on another
> laptop over the previous version of Ubuntu that was on it. Is there no
> fips program in the install? (I don't remember, I've always gone with

No clue how to help you there.

> the default settings). Does it not like that I have NTFS as my file
> system now? If I need to, I can run Partition Magic on the drive and

No, I don't think it's correlated to it being a NTFS partition. To me
it sounds like some ACPCI driver or something that isn't quite all
there... I can only guess though. You really should tell us what
your machine's make and model is. Also, if you downloaded the wrong
architecture, you might be up a creek with a ping-pong paddle. Trying
to put PPC on i386 didn't work that well last time I heard of someone
trying it.

> make the file system for Ubuntu, but I'd have to figure out what kind
> of partition, how, and how big. I do have a blank laptop hard drive I

*buntu needs only ~4gigs, though more is desirable.

> could use, but I looked at this thing, and it would be a pain in the
> butt to A: replace the hard drive and B: to carry around and switch out
> hard drives if I ever wanted to use windows on here.

Yes, that'd be a real pain, and it might not even solve your problem
with the installer refusing to work.

> P.S. The only reservation so far on migrating to linux is that (as far
> as I know) there's know MapPoint like program, and I REALLY don't want
> to run Wine. If there is a MapPoint like program for linux, please tell
> me. I'd love to have every reason to switch to linux.

There's a whole ton of stuff for linux. I don't know what on earth
MapPoint is (sounds like a mapping program, however...) but there's a
really good bet there's something like it for Linux.

Wine is really cool, but it isn't a one-stop-fixes-all type thing.
There's also Cedega (www.transgaming.com) but it costs money. In any
event, dual-booting Windows/Linux until you're really comfortable
killing windows entirely is your best option.

> I've posted this in the two Ubuntu groups also. I saw this group had
> more members. Members = hope... I hope....

Can't speak for the Ubuntu groups, but this group does get a larger
amount of traffic than most other group I know of.