I recently installed ubuntu 11.04 and I made dual boot with windows XP – actually I didn’t make it ubuntu handled this- and I decided to switch for my personal use and @ my work environment as much as I can, I’ll try to mention here some of the issues I faced and how to resolve them to be able to use ubuntu instead of windows.
Most of those solution took about 10 mins googling to find out, when it comes to linux the Internet is very rich it’ll help you in all your problems.
Note: I’m not a Linux expert so there might be some non-precise terms used in my description also there might be better solutions, this is what I tried and worked.
Partitioning for installation
Basically you need two partitions a root partition and a swap partition, for the root you need 15-20 GB, for the swap it is recommended to be double the RAM size but I don’t think this is applicable if I have 3 GB RAM I won’t waste 6 GB of my hard disk as a swap that I’ll probably won’t need so I think that 512 MB-1 GB is enough.
In the ubuntu installer choose to install the boot loader to your entire hard disk so that the dual boot works
Auto mounting drives
In linux to access any hard disk drive you have to mount it first to some folder, it is the same in windows but the process is done under the hood, to auto mount your drives on start up, edit the /etc/fstab to add lines for your drives.
First you need to know the location of your drives, to do this open a terminal and type: df -h this will get you a list of your hard dist drives and the disk space usage of each, now this is the syntax to add a single drive to fstab file
/dev/sda1 /media/c ntfs-3g default 0 0
Drive location, mount point the folder you want to mount your drive to, drive file system type ntfs-3g is used to access ntfs drives and make the drive read/write, other options leave them as default 0 0.
To edit the /etc/fstab file you must be root so assuming you’ll use a GUI text editor to edit the file, open a terminal (in Ubuntu 11.04 a shortcut for this is CTRL+ALT+T) and type:
gksudo gedit /etc/fstab
Type your password and you are ready to edit the file, you might want to take a copy of the file before editing incase something went wrong type: sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.orig
Installing java
Software installation on linux might seem complex as you don’t have a .exe file to setup the program instead there’s something called package manager, this is a smart way to install software the package manager detect the dependencies for your software, installs them and configure your software so with typing only one command you can install the programs, it is something like installing an application on your iphone you just select the application and click install the operating system will download the app, install and configure it.
There’s something called Repositories in Linux, it is basically a place that contains the software you can find a repository for firefox, thunderbird, …etc, Ubuntu has some default repositories that contain a lot of software, Sun JDK is available in what’s called Canonical Partners repository in ubuntu this repository isn’t enabled by default to enable it: open synaptic package manager (in ubuntu 11.04 you can press the windows key then type synaptic and select synaptic package manager), go to Settings->Repositories->Other Software tab and select the checkbox of Canonical Partners, close the package manager.
Now open a terminal and type:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
Here you go JDK will be downloaded and installed
Eslam Foad's Technical Blog 