Putting GNU/Linux on my production machine again

Saturday, March 18, 2006 11:29 pm By BigLig

Dapper Drake is sounding good, and imminent, so I thought I'd put Ubuntu on my production machine again, so I can get some learning space in before it comes out.
OK, rearranging my PC in preparation for Dapper Drake.
I already have most of my data on a separate (NTFS) partition, so that is OK (after a few minutes checking for anything I've missed. This partition also has all the XP drivers for my machine. I move all my music over the network to my second machine, since I don't really have the room on my data partitions.
The partioning plan is three steps:
Before:

  • 55Mb Dell System FAT16
  • 30Gb Windows NTFS
  • 15Gb Data 1 NTFS
  • 10Gb Data 2 NTFS
After:
  • 55Mb Dell System FAT16
  • 10Gb Windows FAT32 (So I can write to it)
  • 20Gb Linux / EXT3
  • 1Gb Swap Swap
  • 15Gb Data 1 NTFS
  • 10Gb Data 2 NTFS
Eventually:
  • 55Mb Dell System FAT16
  • 10Gb Windows FAT32
  • 20Gb Linux / EXT3
  • 1Gb Swap Swap
  • 15Gb Linux /Home ReiserFS or whatever
Writing this out in advance is a good plan because then, when I'm actually using a partioning tool, I know what I can delete.
The Ubuntu install is as ever pleasant; I love the way it finds my network card at the beginning, configures it, and then can pull crucial security updates down during the install.
The next steps are to upgrade it to Breezy (My Breezy CD is bust, so I'm using my Hoary CD). This is all set out in earlier posts; I note that
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
reports that there are 695 packages to be upgraded, 312 to be newly installed, 29 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Phew! Once this is done I do a few minor tweaks (a manual upgrade for Firefox to 1.5, installing 855resolution so my screen resolution is correct) and I have a fully working GNU/Linux box.
Unlike before, my windows partitions have not been detected and mounted, so I put qtparted on to easily see which partition is which. My table above becomes:
  • 55Mb Dell System FAT16 /dev/hda1
  • 10Gb Windows FAT32 /dev/hda2
  • 20Gb Linux / EXT3 /dev/hda4
extended partiton is /dev/hda3 and contains:
  • 1Gb Swap Swap /dev/hda5
  • 15Gb Data 1 NTFS /dev/hda6
  • 10Gb Data 2 NTFS /dev/hda7
Hmm, something odd here, fstab is mounting swap on /dev/hda7. That's not good.

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