Finding my way into the world of Ubuntu Linux

The Ubuntu User Forum is a great place to learn this stuff. I did a little pestering of co-workers and colleagues, but most of the nitty-gritty came from the Ubuntu User Forum. I started with "A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux" which beyond being a great book, also includes a DVD with full Ubuntu 08.10 -- this is what I used for my installation.




So this is what I have:

Clean install of WinXP on a set of SATA drives configured as RAID-0.
I did not touch this disk array.

Clean install of Ubuntu 8.10 on a new 250G IDE drive, including a Master Boot Record.

BIOS configured to boot from the CD-ROM, then the IDE disk, then the RAID.

Grub configured to allow me to choose either the WinXP or the Linux installation. This was a bit tricky.

What I had to do was to boot from the Live DVD, install dmraid (sudo apt-get install dmraid) so that the RAID would be visible to Linux as a single disk.

Then, I installed telling the installer to use the entire new IDE disk, and to create an MBR.

When the install finished, I booted into Ubuntu Linux, and edited the /boot/grub/menu.lst file, adding a section telling grub to display a menu showing me a choice between WinXP and Ubuntu:

Change 1: Changed timeout from 3 to 10
Change 2: Uncommented out the "color cyan/blue white/blue" line
Change 3: Commented out "hiddenmenu"
Change 4: Added the following as the first in the list:

title Microsoft Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

There was one additional problem -- When I first tried booting Ubuntu, it hung on a root timeout and gave me a shell in a very limited (probably the boot) environment. The user forum helped there, too -- I added a new rootdelay into the Ubuntu entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst as shown here:

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-11-generic
uuid 105e82bc-3131-428f-ad9e-aa5f55833421
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-11-generic root=UUID=105e82bc-3131-428f-ad9e-aa5f55833421 ro quiet splash rootdelay=90
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-11-generic
quiet

Still to do: Re-partition the disk so that I have at least /home and /opt on separate partitions so that I can upgrade without destroying my user data, and install dmraid so that my live installation can see the RAID drive so that I can copy data from the WinXP drive. This way I can, for instance, create images in Photoshop and use them in a web page served up by my soon-to-be built LAMP environment.