"Ubuntu 9.10 for a Lazy Windows XP User" on a SAMSUNG NC10 - Part 1

Tim Berk from the Minasi User Group recently threw in the announcement of the new Ubuntu release here which, in turn, drew my attention to the Netbook Remix or UNR ("Karmic Koala"). I was playing with partition sizes on my SAMSUNG NC10 anyway and decided to give it a whirl while I'm at it.

Part 1. Installing

I have been using Linux quite a lot on servers and appliances, but hardly ever under a GUI. So now I'm putting my 'experienced user' hat on and... well, checking out a new netbook OS just like I would do with a Windows Netbook release if there were one.

The netbook already has a working XP installation at the beginning of the hard drive and a data partition at the end; I want to keep them as intact as possible and install Ubuntu in the middle. There is 30 GB of free space I could use for it.

Downloading the UNR went as fast as my Internet connection allows. However, my NC10 wasn't too eager to let it install from thumb drive, and since my objective wasn't debugging this, I simply burned the CD and used an external USB DVD-ROM drive for installation.

I chose the "manual" partitioning option and created an ext3 (28 GB) and a swap partition (rest) within the free space, selected to install GRUB into the newly created Linux partition at the end of the installation wizard (you have to click "Advanced..." to get there), and the netbook did boot into Windows XP after installation - not as bad as I feared :).

Now to making it dual boot. Remember, I am a user in this excercise so as little commandline as possible :)

Booting from Ubuntu CD again, this time choosing to "Try Ubuntu Linux (Computer will not be changed)".

In my case, the Linux partition was /dev/sda5. Extracting the boot block into my Documents folder:

cd Documents
sudo dd if=/dev/sda5 of=./ubuntu.bin bs=512 count=1

The lazy Windows user that I am, I just pop in my 16 GB SDHC card and copy the ubuntu.bin file onto that (Ubuntu detects and mounts it automatically), reboot into Windows XP, copy ubuntu.bin from the SD card into the root folder of the C: drive and add a line to the boot.ini as follows:

c:\ubuntu.bin="Ubuntu Netbook Remix"

Voilá!