60 MA XIMUMPC JANUARY 2006
how (^2) IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE, ONE STEP AT A TIME
2 Prepare Your PC
4 Partition Your Disk
3 Start the Install
Now, you should prep your rig for the actual install. We recommend
installing Ubuntu on a spare hard drive—it needn’t be a huge-capac-
ity drive; an old 20GB drive will provide more than enough space.
Take note of the capacity of your current drive so you won’t acciden-
tally overwrite your current Windows partition and all the data on it.
(Ubuntu’s installer won’t overwrite your Windows partition unless you
tell it to, but it’s better to be safe than formatted.)
If you boot into Windows after you install your new Linux
drive, you can delete the current partitions (go to Control Panel,
Administrative Tools, Computer Management, and then select the
Disk Management option. Right click the partitions you want to
delete, and then select Delete Partition, and go through the dialogs).
The Ubuntu installer will install to unpartitioned areas by default.
Now, you’re ready to get started. It’s as simple as ensuring that
your mobo is set to boot from the optical drive and dropping the
Ubuntu disc into the drive, then restarting your computer. When the
PC boots, you’ll be presented with the screen shown on the right. To
start the install, just type “install” and press Enter
This is the only truly dangerous part of installing Linux. Should you
make a mistake here, you could conceivably erase the contents of your
Windows drive, so pay attention and make sure you understand the pro-
cess before you do anything.
Every partition on every hard drive in a Linux machine is given a
unique name. The formula for names works like this: Parallel ATA hard
drive names start with “hd”, SCSI, SATA, USB, and FireWire drive names
start with “sd”. The next character in each drive’s name is a letter, which
tells you which physical drive a partition is on. For example, the first
SATA drive in a system will be “sda”, the second will be “sdb”. After the
letter will be a number. This number indicates the partition on a particular
drive, so “sdb1” is the first partition on the second SATA drive in the sys-
tem. To get an Ubuntu system working, you shouldn’t need to know any
of this, but a little knowledge never hurts.
If you’re going to wipe an old drive and use it for your Linux drive,
you can do that by using the “Erase entire disk” option and selecting the
appropriate size disk. If you don’t see the proper disk, you can choose
to manually select the free space you want to use, then the installer
will create a main partition for the OS and your apps, as well as a small
If you’d rather give Ubuntu a test spin without install-
ing it to your hard drive, just press Enter at the prompt,
and you’ll be able to try out the OS and ensure your
hardware is supported.
During the early portions of the install process, you’ll need to
answer a few simple questions—such as what language you
speak and what kind of keyboard you use.
It’s surprising, but the Ubuntu disk partitioning tool is very
reliable, and reasonably foolproof. It chooses the most
likely block of free space on your disk to install Linux with-
out disrupting Windows.
Now the Ubuntu installer is going to collect some information
about your system—the language you want to use, the type of
keyboard you have, and the kind of hardware in your system. You’ll
have to answer a few questions, but for the most part, this portion
of the install doesn’t require your input. Once the installer collects
info about your hardware, and configures the network adapter,
you’ll need to assign a hostname. Your hostname can range from
your actual name to something clever, like a character from your
favorite book or TV show. Once you’ve selected a hostname, you’ll
proceed to disk partitioning
swap space that Ubuntu will use as virtual memory. Make the
changes to the drive, and you’re ready to proceed to the sec-
ond stage of the install.