If you haven’t heard of Ubuntu yet, it’s a flavour of Linux that’s based on Debian. To save me the time of writing out why you should be using Ubuntu instead of Windows (or anything else for that matter), all you need to do is have a browse round here: Why Linux is Better.
The first thing you should try is running Ubuntu from a Live CD. Just change your BIOS settings to enable booting from CD and you’ll be there. If your happy, next you should be looking at backing up. Instead, I was looking to upgrade my vanilla XP install by using a customised XP disk with nLite. Below is a log of how I went about it.
I first created a new XP Slipstream disk that contained 64KB cluster size fix: XPSP2 does not normally allow installation on anything other than 4KB cluster size. Unfortunately, the “fix” didn’t work and I was presented with Page_Fault Stop Error’s.
Even after rebooting, the error reappeared, stopping me from continuing with the XP installation. Possible casue for this could have been I didn’t delete and recreate the Temp Partition after installing Windows and assigning the pagefile to it.
Currently, we haven’t found a way of installing Windows on anything but 4KB, but the Temp Partition (w/ 64KB) will work if recreated as above. Also note that Windows will only install to a primary partition and you can only have 4 primary partitions (remembering that an extended partition uses up a primary partition slot).
If creating a NTFS TEMP partition for XP (by setting up partitions before installing Windows), make sure you delete it and re-create it after Windows has installed.
So I had to find a way of reformatting the drive without using a Windows tool. I was going to use Ubuntu’s FDISK (during Live CD use), but instead thought it would be a better idea to make the jump and actually convert to Ubuntu instead. I briefly looked up on Linux software equivalents and came to the conclusion that I would only need to use XP again for Cubase (& no Linux drivers for EMU 1616m) and possibly for games.
Note: it gets rough from here on…
Sun 16 Sep 2007 21:32:43
After backing up, I decided that I wanted to have my 2 years in use hard-drive completely formatted:
sudo shred -n1 -v /dev/hda
Extended:
Create 2 further partitions (as primary):
After Windows has been installed, it installs it’s own bootloader, which hides our Linux install from the system. To allow us to boot back into Linux, we need to recover grub. Used this for the Windows entry:
title Microsoft Windows XP Home
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1
This was hard as I used my XP backup that had D:\\Opera\\ for the paths
used. I had to manually change the paths to their new linux equivelents;
in the GUI and by editing the .adr files. Opera kept re-creating
folders/files outside of the new profile folder, but I managed to
replace all the old paths eventually. Remember, all paths used by Opera
can be checked by enterring opera:about When updating programs (such as
new Opera builds) in Ubuntu, (after running the .deb file) it will
automatically detect that there was a previous version and will
replace/update it perfectly.
/home/tom/.opera/toolbar and enter
manually/usr/share/opera/locale/english.lngI have the Intel i915GM onboard graphics chipset and although the drivers are already included in the distro, there is extra work to be done for it to run at native resolution. Luckily I found some documentation explaining the process. I then ran the autoi915 script and all seems fine!
I thought that even after changing my default resolution back to the monitor’s native, the fonts still looked quite bad. Firstly, I had to find change the DPI to 96 using:
DisplaySize 338 211 # 1280x800 96dpi
After running the xdpyinfo | grep resolution command, my dpi would never be
96x96. After searching around, I found there is a bug in the xorg.config
file. Apply the fix worked. Instead of following the rest of that guide, I found
a script that automates installing MS fonts for a great look. I later
installed Lucida Console manually. I have now changed the system fonts (in
System/Preferance/Font) to Tahoma 8.25 (the default XP) for all system fonts
except Fixed Width Font to Lucida Console 10.
Fin!