Ok – that’s it. Windows 7 is outta here!

In an earlier post I detailed the upgrade of my Vista partition to Windows 7 Eval and how smoothly the process went. Well I’m afraid that the shine has gone off Windows 7 and after looking at the upgrade prices I’m hacked off enough to say that I’ll not be bothering.

I upgraded my laptop from XP to Vista because I was starting a new job and it’s what they used – so I thought I should get up to speed before I started. I later configured the laptop to Dual Boot with Ubuntu but Vista was always my default Operating System – if I wanted to boot into Ubuntu then I had to remember to wait around for the Boot Menu instead of just turning it on and walking away. Recently I was lured into installing Windows 7 and at first I was quite impressed and do admit that it is a massive leap from XP (and probably Vista). As most people say, it is what Vista should have been. Read the rest of this entry »

Dual Booting Vista and Ubuntu

In a previous post I stated that have installed Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) alongside Vista on my Toshiba laptop but this was not as straightforward as I had hoped.

I had upgraded the laptop with a 160GB hard drive and Vista was reporting that there was about 90GB free. Great, I only want about 20-30GB for Ubuntu so I should have no problems at all – should I?

The problem is that when i installed Vista I clicked on the ‘Use Entire Drive’ option – which is what I wanted at the time. Now Vista has the ability to shrink a volume so I thought this would come to my rescue – I was wrong! Even though I had 90GB free the shrink tool would only reclaim about 200MB of it!

I initially suspected that the problem lay with Vista spreading itself across the available disk, i.e. there was some data at the far edge of the disk which was was acting as an outer marker. So surely a ‘quick’ defrag would sort that out – erm, no. Following the 3 hour defrag I ran the Shrink Tool again which now reported that I could reclaim …. absolutely nothing! Damn it!

So I would have to bite the bullet and repartition the drive. The problem was that I had experience of partitioning drives in the past and been burnt on a couple of occasions.

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Getting Organised

Ok – now that I have decided that I’m going to do this and how I’m going to do it, it’s time to get things organised.

I already have a reasonable laptop (a Toshiba A100-147 which I have upgraded with a 160GB HDD, 2.5GB RAM and Vista Home Premium [although some may not see that as an upgrade!]) for my Windows development and although I could develop using Python/PHP within Windows I though that this was not (in my mind) TRUE Open Source development. To make the environment truly Open Source I would have to go to a Linux distribution of some description.

I had played with Red Hat Linux 8 in the past but never had the time to really get into it. I found it pretty difficult to scale the learning curve and ultimately called it a day. But that was a few years ago now and things have moved on a little since then.

I asked my new manager (who is into Open Source in a big way) which Linux Distribution I should start with and he suggested Ubuntu. I had heard of Ubuntu from a few sources but never actually seen it so had no idea what to expect or how it would run on my system.
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