One Story Every Day

A great new prototype has been making the front page of a lot of publications recently. All the fuss is about the new Windows based installer for Ubuntu. What’s the catch ? Ubuntu community wants to help people converting to Ubuntu and wants to make the process as easy as possible.
Unfortunately the news was so over the place and the installer in such a bad shape that a lot of people could be discouraged.

This is the problem with all the betas released out there but let us hope people will be open minded and will try to see the potential here. In order to help people be prepared for this release we’ve compiled a list of common problems that we’ve encounter while doing the so called installation.

1. Before starting the installation , use a software like Partition Magic to create and manage the partitions Linux requires. There is always the default partition manager Ubuntu has to offer but we personally find it a great idea to take care of this process before you start anything else. Remember you need 2 main partitions : one swap partition where the OS will cache and store data when it needs to or runs out or memory. This can be a small partition of 1-2 Giga in size. The other one is the main partition and you can make it bigger. You don’t have to create a huge one because you can always use the windows partition to get the information you already have stored.

2.If you decide to use the installer be sure you have enough space for it. Even if the main file is an iso that is automatically downloaded from the torrent P2P network, after the file is uncompressed a lot of space is need it. And I mean a lot. It’s not a great thing to run out of space and find yourself with no solution to fix the problem.

3.On the other side their is a discussion about the iso file. You should try do copy it separately and even save it after the installation had done the downloading. An iso file it’s good to have around and if something goes wrong you could always decide to start the classic process of burning a CD and do the installation yourself. But overall the idea it’s great and with today high speed internet connection a 600M file download is not really a problem anymore.

4.Be very careful about the restart. After the installation is done the software will ask you to do a restart. The boot manager should play it’s part and start the actual install. If you decide not to play along and choose you don’t want to let the software continue its steps at that point , you will find yourself with a bad and unusable version after you restart windows.

5.A very big problem is the moment you decide you want to uninstall this and start again. ALL the files will be deleted. So the required files will have to be downloaded again. This is done without warning and with files of this size there should be at least a small warning sign.

Another issue we came across is the problem of having your Windows installation stored on other partition then the default one.The installer will try to modify the boot.ini file and at this point almost nothing will work to take care of this problem. So before you start make sure all your windows files are on your C drive.

With all this in mind we hope we made your installation process a bit easier and after a few hours you will find yourself with a full , clean and cool Ubuntu OS ready for work.