The BigLig Thinks

The first step was to decide upon a distribution to use. Ubuntu is an obvious choice – I have been in love with apt-get since I first played with Debian, and Ubuntu adds to this.
Second step was partioning my disk. Back up all the data from my XP system, remove a lot of it (e.g. my iTunes library) to free up space, then defragment. Once this is done, I booted from a Knoppix CD and ran qt_parted, a graphical partioning tool. This shrunk my XP partition down by slightly over 25Gb with ease.
Boot from a Ubuntu CD and off we go. I am tremendously impressed that the install detects I have a wireless card and configures it for me. not that I need network access during the install, but it is a good omen.
Which is not that good, as after partioning (10Gb for the root, 15Gb for /home, 750Mb swap) the install fails – unable to install part of the base software. I suspect a bad write of the CD, so I dig out an older Ubuntu CD – Hoary rather than Breezy – and try that. It goes on fine.
Once it is up and running I start the process of converting to Breezy. I update the sources.list file to include Universal, and to point to Breezy, not Hoary, and run apt-get update to load these changes. Then apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade everything to the latest version. The whole thing doesn't really take that long – just long enough to write these two entries, as well as a start at an introduction to free software to put my choice in context.
Time for a reboot. My first uptime reports 2 hours and 12 minutes...