Erratum _- see http://blog.sudev.in/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=49
I just brought a new HP Tx1000 Pavillion laptop. As most of the laptops come with one or the other Windows operating system, so did this with Vista edition. I work with Linux most of the time and so right from the start I was off working on ways to run this machine under my favourite operating system.
Installation:
I wanted to try the latest offering of Ubuntu 7.04 on this but to my first horror the system refused to load from installer CD with default options. A few minutes on google prompted me to pass on the option “vgahi” at loader screen by pressing F6 key and writing the following:
linux vgahi noapic acpi=off
I have not done research yet on what “vgahi” parameter does but apparently this is needed for wide screen high resoltion viewing. Later I discovered the setting “vga=771″ works better. The other two parameters allow booting laptops without auto-power control.
Well this worked and I had the liveCD graphical environment in front of me. Now the next step is to actually install Ubuntu. Clicking on disk partition icon I was presented with choice of either deleting or resizing the windows partition that had taken over the entire 160gb of hard disk space. However the resizing did not work. So I rebooted the laptop in to Windows Vista and used disk partitioning utility there to “shrink” the partition to 80gb and leaving 80gb of hard disk free for my Ubuntu install.
I must mention at this time that why I did not want to remove Vista altogether at this point of time is to see which hardware needs what drivers. This is useful in later helping solve some of the problems that you may face due to linux drivers not being available for some hardware.
Now it was back to booting Ubuntu and passing on special parameters again by pressing F6 at the first splash screen. This time I straight away pressed on “install” icon and got the installer started. This also asks for partitioning scheme and if you want to continue dual booting you need to have the second partition as “/boot” with boot flag set on. For the rest you can pretty much define what ever scheme you need. Of course personally I would advise set the third partition as “/home” and allocate enough space here. I always do this so that if I have to do a reinstall I do not have to worry about my data getting over written. rest of the installation went on with just click of few buttons and adding information about creating first user account.If you are connected to the internet while install is going on the installer will also set up repositories and at the end prompt you for reboot. That is just about it.
Next i will write about getting all hardware to work. Click here to see Part – II