Trouble installing Feisty on a DELL Inspiron e1505

[Paul S]

Damien Hull said the following on 04/30/2007 10:58 PM:
> I was helping someone install Ubuntu on a DELL Inspiron e1505. We ran 
> into a few problems.
> 
>    1. The Live CD for Feisty wouldn't bring up X

Same laptop and same problem here .. the installer tries to use the vesa 
driver, but fails.  You'll have to use the alternate.

>    2. The alternative CD showed different partitions
>          1. We would like dual boot between Windows and Linux

No problem, except you will lose your dell media player and your dell 
system restore when you repartition and write to the master boot record.
Check out goodells.net/dellrestore for info and suggestions on how to 
preserve it.  I had already deleted my master boot record before I found 
this site, so had no chance to use his tool.  If you haven't installed 
anything yet, you'r master boot record may still be salvagable.  But, 
once you change it, I think you'll lose it anyway.

>          2. I'm not sure how to backup all the DELL recovery partitions
>                1. I think there were 4 partitions
>                      1. MBR
>                      2. Windows
>                      3. Something in the 2gig range
>                      4. Something in the 3 gig range (I think)
>    3. Some of the info I found on Google said something about the BIOS
>       which I don't want to touch
> 
> We booted a copy of Sabayon ( http://www.sabayonlinux.org/ ). X came up 
> just fine. Checked the xorg.conf file and found that it was using the 
> fglrx driver. I'm not sure how that works but that's what was in the 
> xorg.conf file.

My E1505 has the ATI X1400.  The fglrx driver is the ati provided video 
driver for this.  After you install by the alternate cd, you'll want to 
follow the wiki.ubuntu.com entry on installing the ati driver to get it 
working.

> 
> Can someone tell me a safe way to dual boot Linux and Windows on this 
> laptop? It's not mine and I don't want to damage Windows.
> 

You'll still have windows, but the dell media and dell restore will be 
lost.  The alternative is to keep windows installed and use a live CD 
for linux, if that's acceptable to you.

HTH

Paul