techiehenry

(Part 1 of my Ubuntu installation series)

Almost three weeks ago the latest release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, Hardy Heron, was made available for download from numerous servers across the internet. I went and downloaded the i386 ISO image directly from the servers overnight, only to find out that it timed out somewhere on the 500Mb mark. Luckily I was able to find a torrent link from Distrowatch, and by then my download went fast and problem-free. By friday night I had the ISO images for Ubuntu and its siblings Kubuntu and Xubuntu.

What is new in this distro? Read the release notes here.

The following days happen to be weekends, so I have all the time in the world on Saturday and Sunday to do a little experiment: to finally convert my MacBook into one that dual-boots Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. So, here’s how it all went out.

On a side note: It’s been close to a year since I bought my MacBook, and that was when I left Linux temporarily to dip my feet into the Mac OS X platform. I’m not really new with regards to using the platform since I had some projects at work that required the use of Mac OS X, but this will be the first time that I’d be using it as my primary OS at home. I find Mac OS X to be a pretty and stable operating system, with a community that gives all-out support to its members. However I find that I miss using Linux from time to time, since the hand-tweaking that I normally do on it is almost unnecessary on Mac OS X.

The first thing to do was to resize the partition of my MacBook’s hard disk. As we all know, Mac OS X gets the entire hard disk space for itself during installation. I did this by firing up Terminal and typing in the following commands:

sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 90G Linux Linux 20G

My MacBook came with a 120Gb hard disk. In actual use, this translates to a little over 110Gbytes since the computation being used in determining the capacity of the drive is in units of “millions” of bytes (1Mb=1,000,000 bytes as compared to 1Meg=1,048,576 bytes). Part of it has been occupied by the EFI firmware and the root partition for Mac OS X. As the command above states, I have decided to reduce the size of the OS X partition to 90Gb, and allocating the 20Gb freed up for Linux. Take note that this resizing process would take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes depending on how full the Mac OS X partition is.

After resizing the partition I downloaded rEFIt from SourceForge. This is an open source boot manager that can take over during the MacBook’s startup so that the user can decide which partition to boot. The installation is pretty straightforward, I just clicked on the mpkg file, and left the rest to the install application. It will automatically identify all available partitions and present it as boot options at startup (by this time I only have the original Mac OS X partition and an empty one, so at bootup it shows as an icon for a Windows partition).

Now that the boot manager is in place, I burned the Ubuntu ISO to disc and booted the MacBook from CD. If you’re wondering how to do this, after the ‘bong’ sound, press on the ‘C’ key. After a moment you can hear the disc drive whirring to life as it starts to read the disc’s contents. From here on Ubuntu will run live, from which the installation program can be started.

The installation process is pretty much like the previous release, so I won’t comment about how it looks or how everything carries out. However, during the partition phase of the installation, create only ONE partition for the root directory and do not create one for the swap (the swap will be dealt with in my next post — in real world tests 1Gb of RAM doesn’t really need that much space).

After the installation has completed and a reboot is triggered by the Ubuntu installer, you would now see two options in the rEFIt boot menu: one for Mac OS X, and one for Linux (the icon for the additional partition automatically changed to an image of Tux!). Choosing the Linux icon will take you straight to Ubuntu. A few setting changes later, this is how it looks on my MacBook:

Pretty, isn’t it?