Installing Ubuntu

So I've decided to take the plunge and dual boot my desktop PC with XP and Ubuntu. I've played around with the LiveCD version for about an hour, so I know what to expect.

I'm following these instructions, but I needn't have bothered as the setup wizard is pretty self explanatory. The only thing I needed to double (and triple check) was the disk drive I'm installing to.

I have 2 physical hard drives, one with Windows (C:) and one that I just used for data (D:). Preparing for installing Ubuntu I copied everything I needed from D: to an external drive. But knowing that the C: and D: names were Windows specific I checked in the LiveCD environment what names Ubuntu gives the drives.

The installer's currently at 70% as I write this on my laptop, so I hope that my D: drive really was called /media/sdb1, or else I've just buggered my machine...

It should be fine though... I think.... C: was the master drive, and D: the slave, so it made sense that I would have an sda1 and an sdb1. I hope anyway.

82% now, currently Configuring apt, whatever that means.

88%, Importing documents and settings... strange, as I told the wizard I didn't want to do that...

94%, Configuring hardware... I guess if it's all going to fall over in a heap then it'll probably do it now...

Done. Although I'm sure it said it was removing something before that window popped up. Not sure what. Restart now, I guess now I find out if I've screwed up...

Well I've got a boot menu at least, 3 different instances of Ubuntu (generic, recovery, and memtest86+) and Windows XP! Cool, I'll boot back to Windows to make sure I've not messed up. Yay! Still there, and I can no longer see my D: drive, which is as expected if the partition table has changed.

Now for the proper test, will it boot to Ubuntu?

Well it's asking for a username, and the display looks a hell of a lot better than in LiveCD mode. Very quick to get to this stage too.

Apparently I need to enable some "restricted drivers", as my graphics card needs a driver from Nvidia, which isn't "free software" as the Ubuntu people can't look at the source code. That driver's downloading now. And it installed itself too, that was easy enough. But I need to restart. Ok, restart.

That was very quick there, although I guess all operating systems are when they're first installed.

Right, so what're these software updates it's telling me about? Apparently there are 196 updates to apply, a total of 245.4MB. Might kick that off tomorrow. Oh, neat little window animation there when I closed it.

So, right: looks like that's installed then. Easy enough, if a bit nail biting at times. Only took about half an hour as well. Although I'm not sure about that brown swirl of a desktop background, have to get rid of that. I'll have a play and see how I get on.