6 months ago I inherited a Dell Latitude E6500 from a sales person in my office. It has since become my home workstation / travel notebook. This was a relief because up until this time I had been using a Dell Mini 9 running Dell's Ubuntu Netbook Remix loaded with version 8.04 (Hardy Heron). That Mini 9 now lives exclusivly in my server room as a portable diagnostics tool. Combined with a hub or port mirroring on one of my Dell PowerConnect switches, it truly is a tool among tools.
When I received the E6500 it was bloated with Dell's 'complementary' software, by 'complementary' I mean 'garbage', and performance was atrocious. With only 80GB of storage I picked up a new Western Digital Scorpio 2.5” 500GB SATA drive and started from scratch. I opted to build a dual-boot Ubuntu / XP system. I decided to load Windows XP on it because this is afterall a piece of work hardware and the network I currently manage at the Win2003 functional level. However, I'm not new to Linux and understand the advantages it has over Windows. For starters, software! There are literally oodles of open-source, free software available for Linux. It makes my head spin, there is so much. And with Canonical's Synaptic Package Manager, if you can use Windows Explorer... you can install software on Ubuntu. I'm getting slightly off-topic but I'll try to remember to do a future post on the Ludities Guide to Installing Ubuntu.
At any rate, I found the easiest way to go about building a dual-boot Windows / Linux system was to install Windows first. Windows has a very particular bootloader and the installation process tends to stomp on the entire hard drive. When you install Windows don't bother with planning your partitions, simply let Windows use the entire disk and complete your XP installation. Once you're done pop in your Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD and reboot. When prompted to boot from CD, press a key and follow the installation instructions displayed on-screen. When you get to the point where must choose how to partition your disk, select the Manually edit partition table option. You should see your NTFS (or whatever filesystem you chose for your Windows install) partition taking up the entire drive. Right-click this partition and select “Resize”. You will now be able to move the slider back and forth to select the appropriate amount of space for your Linux installation. In my instance I took half of the available drive, so approximatly 250GB. I also kept my partitions simple by not creating a separate Home partition although you may wish to do this differently. I created my Linux Swap partition at 10GB using the rule “Double your RAM” and then created my main Root partition at 240GB. I chose ext4 (or Fourth Extended File System) as my Root partition file system, as opposed to ext3 or many others. For more information regarding ext4 you should read the wiki entry for it. Once you have your partitions laid out simply apply the changes and continue on with the installation. Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) installed device drivers for everything save my nVidia Quadro NVS160 video card. A generic open-source drive was used, a very useable one I might add, but I needed to take full advantage of my hardware in order to have Compiz Fusion perform as good as possible. If you purchased your E6500 with standard video than you will not have to bother with this step.
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