The first thing we will have to do is make sure that you BIOS will boot from the Ubuntu CD on startup, to get into your BIOS you will have to press either [DEL] or [F2] (there are other keys but those are the most common) when your machine first boots up. You should be presented with something similar to the picture below.
You will have to find the boot sequence settings and change these so that your cdrom drive is the first and your harddrive is second, once these have been changed save the settings and reboot with the Ubuntu CD in the drive.
Once the live CD has loaded you will be presented with the Gnome interface that is standard with an Ubuntu install, with this live CD you will be able to install the operating system onto your hard disc or if you prefer just to play around with it and get a feel for it before taking the plunge.
For this part of the guide I will be working on an 8GB drive that is formatted to NTFS (standard for windows 2k upwards). The tool we will be using will be Gparted (GNOME Partition Editor) which can be found under “System -> Administration” on the tool bar at the top of the screen.
The first thing we will need to do is reduce the size of the NTFS partition, because at the moment it is taking up the entire hard disc and we need to create some space for the two partitions we will create for our linux install.
Right click the NTFS partition and choose “Resize/Move”, a new screen will load up showing the partition, drag the arrow on the right of the screen to reduce the size of the disc, make sure to leave plenty of space for your Windows drive, and then click “Resize”. Once back in the main screen of Gparted click apply.
As you will now be able to see, we have a large gray area that says unallocated, right click that and choose “new”. Create an EXT3 partition that takes up nearly all of the free space, but be sure to leave around 500MB to enable us to create a swap partition for our install. Follow the same process again but change the file system for the last 500MB partition to “Linux-Swap”. Now click apply and wait for Gparted to finish.
Now that we have created the partitions we need it’s now time to go ahead and install Ubuntu to do this just double click on the “Install” icon on the desktop. Once that has loaded select your language type and click next and select the timezone that you are in, ok now select the type of keyboard that you use.
Ok now we should be on step 4 (Prepare disk space), select manual on this page and click the forward button. On the next page that appears select the EXT3 partition that we made and edit it and change the mount point to / in the drop down box. click ok and once back in the “Prepare Partitions” page tick the little box next to it in the format column. Skip the migrate users, unless you want to import you Windows user accounts. Fill out the information on page 6 and now get ready for the installer to copy the files to your hard disk. Here is a little video of me installing Ubuntu.
Once everything is installed and you reboot you will probably be faced with the GRUB boot loader if you had Windows installed, if so just select which operating system you wish to use. If you didn’t have windows or another OS installed Ubuntu will run automatically.
Thats about all for now, if you have any questions please leave them in the comments section and I will do my best to answer them. I hope everything has been explained ok, the version of Ubuntu that was being installed is Feisty Fawn (7.04) several newer versions have been released since I wrote this guide, although much of the process hasn’t changed.
