From: MJ Ray Sent: 03 April 2006 07:27
Simon Royal s.royal@totalise.co.uk
I have two hard drives in it at present, one of which is a slave and
I
use to store my stuff on. If I was to replace it as it is only a 540MB drive with another bigger drive, say 2-5GB would this be
enough
to run Ubuntu on?
Surprisingly, Ubuntu recommend 2GB of disk space as a minimum for their standard desktop install.
Also how would this be affect her Windows installation on her
primary
drive?
Not at all, although you'll need another way to boot.
Would installing Ubuntu interfere with booting up as I obviously
want
Windows to be the default boot method and have a boot menu that I could select Ubuntu on when I wanted to use it.
I would hope that Ubuntu's boot manager (Grub, with any luck) can do this simply, but I've not had Windows installed for 11 years now.
I've done this several times over the past couple of months. The Ubuntu install will allow you to specify where and what you want your partitions to be and will pick up the fact that you already have other OSs installed (i.e. windows) and set up grub to run dual-boot.
It will set up Linux to be the default but it's a simple matter to edit the grub menu config "sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst" and tweak it to how you want (hint: run "sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst.old" first, then you can roll back if you get something wrong - been there, done that, etc - which is where the Ubuntu Live CD is a godsend!!).
As for partition sizes; you'll need a swap partition of somewhere between 256 and 512 meg depending on your memory size (I find the size Ubuntu suggests usually works fine) and although a 2Gb partition is good enough for the basic install, if you want to install any significant extra packages or all the multimedia goodies (see http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/12/209257 or, imo even better, http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/) then you'll probably want 4Gb. If you have spare disk capacity then 5Gb should keep you happy for some time :o).
Regards,
Keith ____________ A bend in the road is not the end of the road... - unless you fail to make the turn.
-
Keith Watson