Installing Ubuntu
April 11th, 2008My new Coolermaster Cosmos case has a bunch of drive bays, so I decided this would be a good time to pop in a spare hard drive and give Linux another go. I chose Ubuntu 7.10 (the 32-bit flavor) for its reputation as a friendly, well-supported distro.
Installation was easy. I booted Ubuntu right off the CD and ran the install from a fully functional desktop (MS, please add this for Win7!). The only trick to my setup was that I wanted to use the Vista bootloader as primary instead of Grub. This process isn’t well documented, but it turned out to be pretty easy:
- When you install Ubuntu make sure you put Grub on the Ubuntu disk, not your Windows disk.
- Boot to Vista, install and run EasyBCD.
- Go to Add/Remove Entries and add a Linux entry. Make sure you pick the correct drive and check “Grub isn’t installed to the bootsector” (even if it is).
- Reboot and try it out.
Ubuntu detected every piece of hardware in my system and installed drivers for all but one: my sound card. I had to manually download, build, and install the latest ALSA driver to get it working. This process was non-trivial, but the ALSA wiki walked me through it.