Ubuntu Fever - part 1

As promised, I installed the new Ubuntu release (6.06 - Dapper Drake!) into my laptop. When you boot up (well actually even at the point of the downloading the ISO) you realize that the there is no live CD / install CD nonsense anymore. All is one CD and it is quite convenient.
As I booted off the CD into Linux (Quite fast too for a live CD) it gives me a nice 'install me' icon in the desktop. But when I moved on to installing I was in for two surprises

1. My first play with ntfsresize had partial effects on the disk. Ubuntu still sees a big fat NTFS partition but Windows didn't think so. However Ubuntu has a really good GUI based partitioner which does the job nicely.
2. It never asked me about installing the boot loader - GRUB. I wanted to change the boot loader later but it never asked and installed the thing starightaway. Well - its not a problem but I've lost the recovery option at startup !

However the installtion worked great , like a charm. I am still to install JDK and other stuff I need into the Linux system. All in all it tells you how far the linux systems have come from the geeks tool to laymans OS.

First tech tip - Modifying NTFS partition sizes

Here comes my first tech tip. I've got this wonderful Gateway platinum laptop with 2GB RAM (?!) and a 120GB disk but to my dismay it comes with one hugh partition (Well two of them but the other is one is a recovery partition and is of no use). Throwing away the original Windows setup is a waste (Afterall you paid for it and even though I am the opensource nut, Windows sometimes is just easier to handle. Also there are so many opensource software tools available for Windows (with their Linux counterparts ofcourse) that one can completely live off with). But naturally I want the computer to be a dual boot and how do I resize this big fat NTFS partition without messing up the already installed Windows system ?
Here comes Linux to the rescue!! There is a Linux tool (a bunch of them to be exact) that allows handling NTFS partitions. ntfsresize is the tool of my choice and guess what ? The wonderful Knoppix Live CD comes with the whole bunch of ntfs* tools.

So here is what I did

1. Downloaded the Knoppix Live CD ISO
   
2. Burned it into a CD
3. Booted off the new Live CD. And it picks up the existing partitions nicely
4. Ran ntfsresize with 50G as the preferred size

Wola - that worked like a charm. Stay tuned and the next post will take you in another tech adventure when I install Ubuntu in a dual boot configuration :)

Why Tech tips

I've been doing some computer setting up these days and intersetingly came up with a lot of techy things I would love to share with the world. I felt like blogging them but hey, that makes my original blog a mess ! So here it is - my tech tips to the world - in a seperate blog :)
I would write techy things here and occasionaly a post that is in the grey area would make its way to both the blogs :)