Install Ubuntu

Here I'll go into the steps of installing Ubuntu using the live cd. I'm assuming you are running a desktop PC and currently have Windows XP installed. If you are running a laptop, these steps shouldn't really be any different. If you currently have a different OS besides Windows XP, such as Windows Vista or Mac OS/X, you are going to have to do things a little differently.

STEP 1: BACK UP IMPORTANT FILES AND DOCUMENTS!

This cannot be stressed enough. Any time you're doing any crucial changes to your system, you should make sure you have any important personal files saved to an alternate media. You can use CDRs, DVDRs, flash drives, external hard drives, tape drives, etc. I have an extra hard drive in my machine where I keep all my personal files and I put operating systems on the smaller hard drive.

STEP 2: Understanding Partitions and Filesystems

Don't know what partitioning a hard drive(HDD) entails? You could probably guess by the term used. Partitions on a hard drive are separated parts or volumes(wikipedia).

To begin understanding how a hard drive works, I think it's better to learn that there are two parts to a HDDs disk space. The first 512 Bytes of a hard drive is reserved for the Master Boot Record(MBR), which can't be partitioned or used to format with any kind of filesystem or personal data(wikipedia). The MBR is reserved to index the rest of your hard drive so that your system knows where to go on the HDD when you boot it up. After this first 512 Bytes, the rest of the disk space can be modified to your liking. I'll go into explaining the MBR later.

Creating partitions is like taking a great big room and turning it into multiple rooms. If you delete data in one partition, it doesn't affect the data in the other partitions. A partition has to be at least 512 Bytes big(why you would want a partition remotely that small is beyond me, but it's good to know this fact). So, theoretically, depending on how many 512 Byte chunks you could break your disk space into, that's how may partitions you can have on your hard drive. Obviously, creating 512B partitions is quite unreasonable.

I don't want to confuse you. 512B is the smallest you can make a partition. You can make a partition as big as you want, depending on how much disk space there is available. If you bought a new hard drive and there was 80GB of free space, you could make one partition 80GB big if you wanted to.

There are 3 different types of partitions: primary, extended, and logical. This is a simple concept, yet it can be tough for one to explain and another to grasp. A HDD can only be broken up into 4 primary partitions. An extended partition is a type of primary partition. The difference is that an extended partition houses logical partitions. Think of it as a primary partition that can be divided and the divided parts are the logical partitions. It's like a room with multiple cubicles in it. The room is the extended partition and the cubicles are the logical partitions. However, there can only be one extended partition. So, if you had 4 rooms and one of them had cubicles in it, you can't have cubicles in any of the other rooms. You can create as many logical partitions as the extended partition can hold.

To sum things up:

• there can be no more than 4 primary partitions
  
• one of those primary partitions can be an extended partition
  
• you can create as many logical partitions as the extended partition can hold

As I hinted before, this does not mean that you must have 4 primary partitions. Usually, if you buy a pre-built PC with Windows installed, there will be only one primary partition covering the entirety of the HDDs disk space. You can even make that one partition an extended partition and use all the space to make one logical partition. However, note that Windows will not run on a logical partition, it requires a regular primary partition(I'm not sure about Mac OS/X, but Linux distributions can be installed on logical partitions).

Once you have a partition created, you must format it with a filesystem before any data can be written to it. A filesystem is

"A data structure or a collection of files. In Unix, filesystem can refer to two very distinct things, the directory tree or the arrangement of files on disk partitions." - http://www.emulex.com/support/glossary.htm

This definition points out how the term "filesystem" can be confused with the file hierarchy of an OS. "Filesystem" can refer to the way data is stored to a partition, or how the files and directories are arranged and organized in the OS. I'd rather use "file hierarchy" for the latter. Generally, different filesystems work in the same way. The only big differences are the speeds an OS can work and features like journaling(which helps an OS recover from a crash).



There are many different types of filesystems out there. Windows used to use FAT(File Allocation Table), first with the 16 bit version(FAT16), and then the 32bit(FAT32). This format can still be used, but newer Windows operating systems run better on NTFS(New Technology File System). Like there are different distributions of Linux, there are different types of filesystems Linux can run on. Currently, the most popular is "ext3." I'd suggest using this type for a few reasons, one because it's stable, another because there is a driver that allows an NTFS filesystem to communicate with it.

STEP 3: Determine Your Current Partition Table

There's a Disk Management tool for XP, but I wouldn't suggest using it, let alone learning from it. Partition Magic is pretty popular among Windows users, but I'd suggest using Gparted for a few reasons, besides the fact that it's free. You can find the latest version of Gparted by clicking here. Once it's done downloading, you do the same thing with it as you did with the Ubuntu Live CD.










I'M STILL WRITING ON THIS, PLEASE COME BACK

STEP 3: Prepare Your HDD

STEP 4: Install Ubuntu



https://help.ubuntu.com/