Hello, my name is Alan Pope. Welcome to this screencast.
In this screencast we are going to look at dual boot installing Ubuntu.
That means running Windows and Ubuntu side by side on the same computer.
We have a computer here that has got Windows already installed and we want to install Ubuntu,
but be given the choice a boot time, whether to run Windows or Ubuntu.
So we are logging on now to the Windows desktop
and I have inserted an Ubuntu CD.
The CD I have used is version 6.06 of Ubuntu, otherwise known as Dapper Drake
and we can see that if we go to My Computer, there is my Ubuntu CD.
While we are here, if I right-click and select autoplay
or if I insert the CD whilst Windows is running,
this application starts up, showing some Windows based open source applications
that you can install directly from the CD.
This is useful for people who maybe aren't ready to do the switch to Ubuntu yet,
but want to have a look at what open source has to offer.
There are a number of applications, including a web browser,
email client, word processor, instant messenger and graphical editor.
These are all part of the OpenCD project.
What we are going to do next is boot from this CD to try out Ubuntu.
So let us reboot the PC.
You may need to set your PC to boot from CD,
which might need to be done in the BIOS, or you might have a menu option when you turn your computer on.
It might mean that you have to press a certain key,
del or a certain function key, in order to make it boot from a CD.
And this is now booting from the Ubuntu CD that you just saw under Windows.
You can see that there is a progress bar crossing the screen slowly
and various pieces of text going up the screen, telling you what it is doing.
And this is going to boot into a live environment, that you could use on a desktop or laptop PC,
but you will also have the option of being able to install it on to your hard drive.
Now bear in mind that we have already got windows on this hard drive,
so we are going to have to partition the disk, so that we can fit Ubuntu on there as well as Windows.
Now this procedure doesn't always work 100% reliably,
so it is worth saying that you should backup everything on your Windows partition as a matter of course,
before you attempt to repartition the disk and install Ubuntu.
That is just a sensible precaution anyway.
In addtion to which, sometimes this procedure doesn't actually work
for certain makes and models of PCs,
certain chipsets of Motherboard
and there is an alternative CD, called the alternate CD, that doesn't boot into a live environment,
but still allows you to install Ubuntu and that's another option you can try
and we will probably look at that in another screencast.
Bear in mind it is slightly slow to boot up because it it running everything from a CD,
which is orders of magnitude slower than running from a hard disk.
So now we have the Ubuntu desktop,
running from the live CD
and we could use the various applications installed
or we could go and have a look at the disks as they are configured.
We use the GNOME Partition Editor or gparted.
This is gparted, the GNOME Partition Editor and you can see we have one disk in this machine,
which is addressed as /dev/hda.
There is one partition on there which is an NTFS partition,
that is my Windows partition.
It has got plenty of unused space, so what we want to do is shrink that partition down,
and you can see, if I click on it, there is a move/resize option.
So, directly in gparted, I could resize that partition down to make room at the end
for my Ubuntu installation.
Now I'm not actually going to do that in gparted,
because the installation software has the ability to do that as well,
so we are going to try that, but as I said
sometimes the partition editor can't work in certain situations
and that is why you need to to know that gparted is there, that allow you to repartition disks.
So I've double-clicked the install program on the desktop
and it is now asking me which language I want to run the installer in
and I'm going to run it in English.
I click forward and it now asks me where I am in the world.
This is for setting up time zone and the time on my computer.
I have said that I am in London, which is the nearest city to where I am
and you can see here, the current time is the same as the current time on my local machine, so that is right.
I click forward.
Now it is asking me what keyboard layout I have
and down here I can test out the keyboard layout,
pressing special keys to make sure that they all appear correctly.
Once you have chosen the correct keyboard layout, press forward.
Now it's asking you for your name. There is no nafarious reason why it needs your name,
it is just so that when you display things, they come up with your name correctly.
Here is your username, which you can choose
and a password to secure your data and your machine.
This first user will be an administrative account and will have quite a lot of access to control the machine,
so we need to be careful with that password.
And we give the computer a name.
Now it's asking us which disk we want to install Ubuntu on,
it goes off and scans to find out how many disk there are in the machine.
And we get a number of options here.
The first one is the one I am going to choose,
resize the first IDE disk, but there are other options.
You could wipe the disk, now I don't want to do that because I don't want to lose my Windows install,
I want to have a dual boot installation.
We can move this slider backwards and forwards to create the size of our new partition
in which we will install Ubuntu.
When I click forward it goes off to do some analysis
and it should do the repartitioning.
Remember again sometimes this repartitioning doesn't work,
you might need to use gparted, alternatively you might actually need to use a third party CD
which we will look at in just a moment.
Incidentally the alternate CD has further options for this disk partitioning.
Okay, so now we have a summary of what it plans to do to our machine.
You can see down here at the bottom, it's going to add two new partitions
in addition to our existing Windows partition.
Partition 2 on hda first disk is going to be of type Ext3,
that is the type of filesystem it is going to use,
and partition 5 on hda is going to be swap.
Swap on Linux is the equivalent of Page File on Windows.
So now the installer is running and we can pretty much leave it alone,
we can go off and use the applications installed here.
So have a play around with Ubuntu while it is installing.
You can see now that it is creating the filesystem on the second partition of the first hard disk
and now it is actually getting on the the installation proper.
This takes a little while, so let us go and have a look at the web while the installation is running.
The length of the time it take to install is dependant on a few factors,
usually the speed of your computer, how much memory you have got and the speed of your CD-ROM drive.
Now if we open our web browser and I take you to wiki.ubuntu.com
and in the top right we search for dual boot,
you will find the documentation that supports this screencast.
In fact this screencast was based on the content of some of this web page.
It's worth pointing this out because this web page has some useful information,
if the procedure that I have shown does not work.
So for example there are issues with XP and NTFS
and here it details what to do if partitioning doesn't work
or the installer fails with some other reason to do with the partitioning of the disk.
It also outlines down here that modern PCs do not come with a Windows CD.
An image of the Windows CD often comes on the hard drive and you have to burn it yourself.
So it's a check that you need make that you have a copy of the Windows CD, should you need to reinstall it.
Now let us skip forward in time slightly.
Of course it will actually take a little bit longer than this, but let us skip forward a bit here.
Nearly finished.
Okay, we are right at the end now.
Grub is a menu that gets installed, which is the first thing you will see when you reboot the PC.
So now the installation has finished I can continue to use the live CD if I want to
and carry on using the applications, just straight off the live CD,
but now that I have installed Ubuntu I probably want to reboot to the hard disk.
So that it is quicker and I can then customise the applications for my own use.
So if I hit the power button in the top right hand corner and reboot the PC.
First thing you see is it shut down nicely.
Then it will ask you to remove the CD and press enter
and then when you turn your PC on, you need to make sure that it reboots from the hard disk
and not from the CD.
Of course if you remove the CD, that is not a problem.
So here is the GRUB boot menu.
There is a number of options here,
There are two options at the top for Ubuntu.
The first option is to boot normally into the graphical user interface,
the second is recovery mode, which with some assistance you can fix some problems that can occur.
The third one does a memory test,
memory problems can cause a lot of issues in PCs these days,
that is why there is a test there.
And the last option is the other operating system installed.
If we choose the first option on this list and boot up, you can see now
it is booting into Ubuntu.
And again we get the progress bar going across the screen
and the messages going up the screen.
We happen to use version 6.06, otherwise known as Dapper Drake,
But you could install a newer version, Edgy Eft version 6.10 is also available
and it looks much the same.
So this is the log on screen
Now if we log on to Ubuntu using the username and password
that we created during the installation.
We should get the Ubuntu desktop appear
You will notice that it is significantly faster booting from the hard drive
than it was booting from the CD-ROM.
There we go, we are straight into the desktop.
There is our CD-ROM
and our applications we will find under the Applications menu
and there are loads of other good stuff up there, which will be covered in other screencasts.
That is it, we have got Ubuntu installed and let us just do the final check
We will reboot the PC and make sure that we can still get into Windows.
So if I choose Windows XP from the boot menu, GRUB.
There we go, it boots into Windows, no problem!
It is all looking good.
Just a final check,
by logging on.
This all looks good
Okay, so in summary
We can install Ubuntu on a disk that already has Windows on it.
by resizing the partition that Windows is in
leaving about ten gigabytes free for Ubuntu to be installed.
and the installer sets up GRUB so that we can choose which
operating system to boot to.
Thanks very much for watching,
My name is Alan Pope, you can contact me, alan@popey.com