Ubuntu. Installation and beyond.

Ok I’ve run Ubuntu 10.10 64bit on my PC direct from a bootable dvd disk and also had Blender 2.57 RC2 running on it.

I’m a little nervous about running the Ubuntu installer from the bootable cd and I just wanted to check if anyone had done this recently.

I want to install Ubuntu to a second hard drive in my PC and I’m wondering whether the installer is going to give me the option of choosing the second drive or it defaults to the primary drive in the PC. I’m sure that it will give me prompts to cancel if it does only see the Primary drive but it is making me nervous none the less. :eek:

The second drive is now empty and formated as NTFS with the 4096 default settings.

if you have never ever done a linux installation - you are lost!
You did not say what primary operation-system you are running on this computer.
That is a big difference. There are windows-versions, which will make no problems, while other will refuse to boot - you have to manually add the boot-option for it - or even they will always destroy the boot-information for linux every time they are started.

First: you have to backup your serious data to an external drive(maybe usb … or burnt to dvd)
Second: you have to make shure you have the install-system of you windows,
because if you have none, you will be lost at once, because you cannot re-install windows again.
Third: you should not use a windows format like ntfs for the linux-root-system (i really doubt it will work at all … creation of device-files? … file-attributes?).
Forth: it is possible to install linux on a seperate harddisk partition without installing the boot-manager grub. But you have to know where in the install process to make the changes, the default is (like in windows) only to click on proceed and get a running system (but maybe without old windows).

Last, you should check in the ubuntu-forum about problems and howtos about your current windows-version. There are a lot of people with a dual-booting system … … but you have to search explizit for the kind of your windows-system.
its in :
> http://ubuntuforums.org/
there look /search the folder:
“Installation & Upgrades”

Thank you test -dr.

Sorry I should have given more info.
I’m on Windows Vista Home Premium 64Bit, Intel Q8200, 8GB Ram, Nvidia 9600GT 512MB.

Yes I’m all backed up for data but not the OS. Yet!!!

“if you have never ever done a linux installation - you are lost!”
I’ll consider that as a challenge :slight_smile:

I’ll head over to the forum link you posted.

Thanks.

Well, I’ve installed Ubuntu side by side with Windows on half a dozen computers. It’s usually a very easy process. I’ve never lost data. With that said, I use Clonezilla to make a clone of any partitions or disks before I do anything.

During the installation process, you will have to convert at least some of your drive from NTFS to EXT3 or EXT4 because linux runs on that. The installer will walk you through this. The installer will also ask you to create a swap area on your disk. For the swap area, I usually assign 10GB to it. For the OS partition, I would assign at least 30GB. You can keep the rest of your disk as NTFS but as you become more and more accustomed to using Ubuntu, you’re going to want some extra EXT4 space. Ubuntu can read and write to NTFS but the system files have to be in EXT3 or EXT4.

Anyways, take the challenge. It’s fun!

loopduplicate, this is not exactly side by side as its a completely seperate physical hard drive.

Went over to the Ubuntu forums and the advice I got was to physically unplug the vista drive as the installer would automatically write the grub to the primary disk MBR.

Did that and it all went pretty smooth I can run Ubuntu from the F10 boot up menu and vista still automatically boots if I dont hit F10. Challenge achieved :wink:

Smart data is showing bad sectors on the second hard drive though, its very old so I’ll probably buy a new one and re-install Ubuntu again using the “Unplug Vista Drive Safe Mode” method. :slight_smile:

Need to learn a bit of the Ubuntu OS as well as I chose the “use whole drive” install option, apparently it didn’t provide the /home directory whatever the hell that is. :slight_smile:

Anyway Blender runs pretty quick on Ubuntu taking 10 seconds off a simple scene that takes 1 Minute 5 seconds to render on vista.
But… the minute I run the User Preferences, Blender just dissapears. I presume its shut down.
I’m using the 2.57 RC2 on Ubuntu which I’ve extracted into a folder and I’m just running from there.
I’m guessing that because its not an installed version its not finding the right file in the Blender folder.

No experience of the Ubuntu OS (yet) so any ideas.

I did a Linux install to a vista-windows laptop over a year ago - and it worked without problems - means: no lost of data and i did install the grub to the first
harddrive-boot-sector and grub did find the windows-version and did add a boot-menu-entry into the grub-boot-menu.
Only thing, if you need to get some space free on your first hard-drive (this is repartition it with gparted) you should have run a windows-harddisk-optimize first and made a backup (even if it should not be necessary). Then you can install linux
on the free part of this hard-disk.

About the crash in the Blender-2.5x-Userpreferences:
?
Did you try both ways?
One way opens an extra window to setup the userpreferences (from the top-bar-menu)
and the other opens the user-preferinces inside the running 3d-view-window (thats from the window-select-menu where you choose the kind of window display like 3dview, image-editor, compositor, python-console, text-editor and … user-preferences).

If it crashes when trying to open an extra window, then you should check for your display-drivers. For a nvidia get the proprietary-driver (select it in hardware…) for other GraKa (like ati) you may have to disable some features …
… there were news about some problems (even with blender …)

test-dr.
Thanks you were spot on.
Yes it works fine if I open using the window select menu.
Got the Nvidia drivers and now the User Preferences opens fine in a new window.

At the moment I like the idea of having the Ubuntu OS on a completely separate drive as I’m only using it for Blender,… At the moment :slight_smile:

Now i’ve got to work out how to associate .blend with the blender exe…

Edit: well that was pretty painless got that working now.