<div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 12:18 AM, Kevin Hunter <<a href="mailto:hunteke@earlham.edu">hunteke@earlham.edu</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im">At 3:06am -0500 Sat, 20 Feb 2010, Gryllida wrote: > I have only one partition. Windows XP currently boots from it. I > don't know where I can install Ubuntu... Maybe I could shrink the > existing partition, but that's quite dangerous - will XP boot > from it again then? </div>Let me suggest virtualization as the possible better route. Reasoning: 1. You've suggested that you're much more comfortable with Windows. If you're interested to learn Linux, virtualization is one very harmless way to check it out. 2. You won't need to do any partition management. The only thing you'll have to do is create a large file, say 10G for starters. This large file would be the "hard drive" of the virtual computer, and you would create it with the GUI tools available through the virtualization solution. This is safer, because contrary to David's experience, I have definitely encountered instances (2 in the last month) where there were issues with the existing partition such that the Ubuntu installer didn't play nice 3. If you decide you don't like it, it's as simple as clicking a delete button in a GUI, and you get all your disk space back. Juxtapose that experience with having to repartition everything again. 4. You can run both systems simultaneously. It sounds like you live most of your life in Windows, and trying to convert too quickly might cause you headache. Besides, if you're doing web development, you need to see the rendering capabilities of multiple browsers. Having to reboot to windows every so often just to check the rendering of a web page would get tedious fast. 5. Virtualization tools are free and Free. VirtualBox is my current favorite general-purpose virtualization solution because it's super fast, "just works", is easy to install on almost every platform (including Windows), and is GPL to boot. (Side note: VirtualBox is the *much* bigger loss than MySQL in this Oracle buyout of Sun. Much bigger.) 6. If you understand the concept that a virtual computer means "virtualizating /everything/ for the 'guest' computer", then learning the VirtualBox GUI should take you no more than 30 minutes. It's very easy, and has wizards for a large portion of what it does. Further, it's help documentation is surprisingly well-written. Reasons not to go the virtualization route: - You don't have enough RAM. Remember that you're virtualizing a computer, and it will need RAM, just like a physical machine. So you'd need devote at least 512M of RAM to a guest Ubuntu while it was running. If you don't have the ram to spare, virtualization might not be a solution. - You don't have the virtualization hardware support available on your processor or enabled in your BIOS. I don't actually know how to check for this with Windows, but on Linux, you would do: $ grep -Ei "vmx|svm" /proc/cpuinfo If that returns any data in your flags line, you have the capability. You might have to enable it in the BIOS, but at least you know you have it. Kevin <div><div></div><div class="h5"> -- sounder mailing list <a href="mailto:sounder@lists.ubuntu.com">sounder@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/sounder" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/sounder</a> </div></div></blockquote></div> no, I want Ubuntu be independent of Windows. Thanks again for this suggestion.