Winbuntu

June 29, 2008 – 9:27 pm

Now that I have a an iMac for my personal use at home, my old Dell Inspiron e1505 laptop has been tucked away in a bag, neglected, collecting dust.

This weekend I decided to make it useful again…by installing Ubuntu on it.

Well, actually I kept Windows on it as well. Well, actually I wiped the hard drive first then did a clean install of Windows XP followed by the Ubuntu installation. Yep, dual-boot to the max!

The Ubuntu installation was easy and functioned seamlessly with my Dell upon initial boot up. Of course, that wasn’t the case for the Windows XP installation.

Most of the drivers included in the Dell drivers disk didn’t work with my system which meant searching the internet for the correct ones.  I found most on the Dell website, but there was at least one that I had to hunt elsewhere for. Blah. So after I got that mess figured out, I happily logged out of Windows to start working on the fun part.

I found some good resources on creating a dual-boot Windows/Ubuntu system, including a forum post with a good layout of partitioning proportions. Like I said, the Ubuntu installation went flawlessly. I even got Compiz Fusion up and running, bringing the sexiness level close to that of my iMac.

Needless to say, I don’t think I’ll be booting up Windows XP anytime soon.