installing ubuntu for a friend

[cybormoron]

i'm hesitating about installing ubuntu on my friend's laptop. there's no windows recovery disc or partition that we can find. although if it was my computer i wouldn't hesitate to wipe xp and go for it but i'm a little shy about wiping xp from someone elses computer.even if i do a dual boot install would there be a way to restore the partition space?the live cd runs great. wireless even works.i think i'm going to insist that he run ubuntu instead of xp anyway. it just isn't safe for him to keep using xp on this machine. there's currently no AV and this machine has had every piece of known crapware on it. it really doesn't run very well either.so here's my plan: it's a 40gb drive (37.5 actual). i've got the windows xp partition cleaned up to about 19gb which leaves about 19gb free. does 10gb sound ok for ubuntu? 6gb - /, 3.5gb - home, 512mb - swap?or should i delete more stuff on win xp to make more space for ubuntu? i might be able to squeeze another several gb's out of the xp.i think he wants a new computer anyway. he asked me to look for a good used mac but i offered ubuntu. i promised it would save him thousands of dollars, lol.i guess i should just go for it. there's really nothing to lose. if xp isn't trustworthy and needs more money to protect it then it should go in the trash, right?another issue is the wifi adapter. it's a wireless-B. i had to drop down to WEP to make it work. WPA wouldn't work. so i guess he's gonna have to get a new adapter?any advice or tips i might not have thought out?edit...grammar correction added apostrophe to friend's

Edited September 9, 2009 by cybormoron

[Bruno]

10 GB is enough for a distro . . .but it is not much.I would indeed look for another wireless adapter if this one only supports WEP, WQEP is very easy to crack. Bruno

[BillD]

does 10gb sound ok for ubuntu? 6gb - /, 3.5gb - home, 512mb - swap?

I have used virtually that same partitioning scheme on several older computers, both for Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS so that I could put all the Linux into 10 GB and it has worked fine. The main thing is not to put too much stuff in /home after he gets it running; some people seem to have a fixation to store everything they ever did on their hard drive!Bill

[striker]

Reading the story I'm under the impression your friend might be the install guy, you know seeing this and click, and so on. Anyway, in that case 10GB for a linux distro, well in the old days not so long ago it would suffice; but with the modern distros nowadays I personally would opt for at least 15GB for /, most programs install in that directory anyway...10 or 15GB for /home, and depending on the distro 1GB for SWAP or no SWAP at all. (I always use 1 or1,5GB if I have the room for it.)After installing Ubuntu check that it is indeed using the SWAP partition ... wanna bet it doesn't use it???The Wifi: I would ditch it, either use ethernet or get him another Wifi: WEP is absolutely useless, hacked within seconds, WAP : same story, hacked in no time, so all what's left at the moment is WPA2 and preferably not with TKIP but with AES. (The TKIP is the thing which got hacked recently)What I would do with this machine is leaving the hard disk drive alone, and use another one dedicated for linux.That way he can do with it what he wants, either use XP or use linux.

[zlim]

I'd burn an image of his current setup BEFORE I'd do any change at all. It is very comforting to have restore/recovery images from a point in time when everything was working.In August, I had to use recovery images several times because my HP notebook was using 100% of the CPU and services was running at 85% -96% for hours. The desktop icons never loaded. It happened twice and each time, after hoping it would eventually settle down, I restored from an image I had burned.

[cybormoron]

thanks Bruno, Bill, striker, lizi ran into a problem. resizing the windows partition failed. i can only guess of 2 reasons; unmovable data, or 10 percent rule, or maybe ubuntu partition tool isn't up to the task. maybe if i try another partition tool? otherwise i'm just going to have to use the whole disk.any suggestions on what partition tool to try? i know how to use cfdisk on an empty disk. can that be used to resize windows?how do i burn an image of the current setup as liz suggests?here's a gallery of the errorhttp://www.imagebam.com/gallery/c9d3d6bcd2...d3b065f885cd12/

[Bruno]

any suggestions on what partition tool to try?

In my opinion the best tool is "DiskDrake", the tool included in every Mandriva . . . it does resizing like no other . . . ( when running Mandriva Live you can find DiskDrake in the MCC ) Bruno

[zlim]

I'm with Bruno. I'm a linux continuous new explorer and I always use the live PCLinux 2006 to create mount points and make partitions. PCLinux 2006 uses the Disk Drake tool so no wonder I can use it.I printed this out http://www.bitbenderforums.com/~bobguy/pcl/installation.html and refer to it whenever I need to create a partition for any OS.I tried the live install from Ubuntu on my slave drive. When I rebooted, Ubuntu was working on my master drive! I had to use an image to get windows back then use supergrub to be able to boot into it. I learned my lesson and now just don't bother with any other tool.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I just saw this mentioned as a free backup/image programhttp://majorgeeks.com/Macrium_Reflect_FREE...tion_d6034.htmlI haven't looked at it so I can't comment.I use the paid program, Acronis true Image.

Edited September 12, 2009 by zlim

[BillD]

I use the paid program, Acronis true Image.

Yes, as I told Colin, so do I since it has a much nicer GUI than BootIt. And since I already had DiskDirector, I use it for partitioning just to make sure nothing goes wrong when I use the PCLos partitioning tool to set the partition usage. DiskDirector can also be used as the boot manager, if one wants. Of course the combined cost is more than the combined cost of BootIt, but I think the GUI's make the difference worth the cost, altho I have a Ubuntu/XP installation running on one computer using BootIt (which I got years ago when Fred Langa mentioned it), but mainly when I use it, I am re-sold on Acronis!Bill Edited September 13, 2009 by BillD

[striker]

Which version of Acronis are you using Liz? And Bill?

[cybormoron]

ok Liz, i think i'll take your advice to heart. i haven't been too concerned with creating an image because i believe this computer to be compromised but i guess a bad image is better than no image. if this was my computer i wouldn't worry but like i say it's not mine so i should take the hippocratic oath (first, do no harm) and make sure i can restore things. the last thing i want to hear from my buddy is "you screwed up my computer". ok that said, how exactly do i go about this? i've never done an image before. what are the prerquisites? do i need another drive? an external drive? i'm guessing i can plug in an external usb drive and run a command from a live cd? i would prefer not to have to buy a windows program. part of the goal is to not spend any money or as little as possible.thanks

[cybormoron]

one other thing, can we sidetrack this topic temprarily and discuss getting me an external drive for backup storage? i've been thinking about it anyways and it will probably behoove me to do so. any recommendations?

[zlim]

striker, I use Acronis v8 and Home 2009 depending on the computer.Steve, if it doesn't work, at least you'll have an image to restore so your friend will have something that works. Even if it limps along, it is better than not working at all. If it is compromised, he can keep it off the internet and still use the laptop to do other things.As far as an external hd, I suspect every brand has good and bad years. I currently have an 80GB Western Digital. You can tell by the size that it is old but it meets my needs. I'm also wondering if a huge external hd will be seen by my old computers. At this point, I'm not ready to buy something that is 300-500GB only to discover that my 2K computers don't see it.When you look for an external, get one with its own power supply. While the portable ones are nice to cart along, I'd worry that the USB port wouldn't have enough power.If I want to cart something with me, I rely on USB sticks. I have several 8GB ones and quite a few 4GB ones. I've been giving away my old, small USB sticks to people who don't have any. I'm trying to prepare the seniors I help for the new computer that doesn't have a floppy drive. I show them how to use a USB stick for their files instead of storing them on floppies.

[striker]

@Liz: thanks!Steve,I use a WD 160GB (WD1600BEVS Scorpio Blue -Sata), connects through USB 2.0 - no extra external power connectors required.It's whisper quiet!http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=264Note: the original photo to see how it looks like seems to be removed, however this one looks like an exact copy of what it looks like:http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=722

[cybormoron]

from my googling around it seems all i have to do is:1. get a big external hard drive.2. run the dd command against the xp partition.does that sound about right?

[BillD]

Which version of Acronis are you using Liz? And Bill?

Well, I am using DiskDirector 10, but they seem to have changed their product numbering systems since I originally purchased True Image because I bought TI ver. 9, and then when they came out with TI ver. 11, I emailed them and talked them into sending me an EBD .iso for TI 11 (because TI 9 was not doing something I thought it should do, and they agreed). However, I see that they now have what they call "Home 2009" so I don't know exactly what the differences might be. Interestingly, when I type "Acronis" into Google, before I can type any further a list of stuff pops up, one of the top ones being Acronis True Image 11, so they must have changed the name recently and in fact I see a review of ATI and it is noted that "sometimes 2009 is referred to as v. 12" so I guess they did upgrade recently somewhat.Bill Edited September 14, 2009 by BillD

[cybormoron]

i'm looking at this from best buy. i didn't know it was on sale or i would have bought it while i was at the store. same price that newegg has for this. 30 day return policy no questions asked. gee whiz, i could go into the neighborhood storage business with this, huh?http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?sk...d=1218109896939more herehttp://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id...equestid=465882when i get this i'm going to have to format it to ext3 or something. do i treat this external drive as i would an internal. could i do 1 big partition or would i have to make smaller ones?next issue is how to do the windows xp image, test it, verify it, etc. should i use this acronis or is a linux tool sufficient?

[zlim]

My external is FAT32, of course it is tuny by today's standards. I let it that way because I use it among different windows OSes and linux.I can't tell you which to use because I've only had experience with Ghost and TI. I did use the included makelivecd in PCLinux 2006 but I don't think that is included in every distro and it wouldn't work to make an XP image. I tried using dd on my eeepc but because of the bizarre way the sd is set up, my "image" never had the complete setup so I gave up trying to do it that way.

[BillD]

I can't tell you which to use because I've only had experience with Ghost and TI. I did use the included makelivecd in PCLinux 2006 but I don't think that is included in every distro and it wouldn't work to make an XP image.

I'm losing track of exactly what we are talking about here anymore in this thread, but I use the EBD I made from Acronis TI to back up (image) both XP and Linux partitions. The only requirement is that the backup images be put on a FAT32 partition and my external USB drive is formatted for FAT32.Never did like Ghost, which is why I tried BootIt and settled on Acronis after that. (The version of Ghost I had was about 2000, I think, and I tried the Power Quest Drive Image (later purchased and eliminated by Norton so there would still be a market for their later Ghosts) but that did not seem to work with Linux and external USB drives, hence my later choice of Acronis TI, however as I noted above, you can accomplish the same thing with BootIt I believe, altho I don't recall making backups to a USB drive with BootIt . . . so I am not sure about that because I used BootIt to image to another partition on the same drive).Bill Edited September 15, 2009 by BillD

[striker]

@Steve: do a search on the net for the writing speed and the reading speed of the drives you have in your mind. The one I'm using had good speed for both, but there are drives which are not so speedy. I can't offer a link for it because I failed to bookmark it way back then. All I can remember was that I searched for 'review test <model of drive here>' and one of the results was a review in which they tested the actual speeds. They did other brands/drives too.@all: I'm not a fan of Acronis imaging products (therefore I'm using Terabyte-Unlimiteds products); over at Wilders is a special forum section dedicated to Acronis products. Read the problems mentioned there before deciding to take the plunge. And of course don't try to image the system if you're not absolutely sure it is in perfect shape and has no failures.

[cybormoron]

i bought the one from my previous link.thanks striker, don't know much about speeds. i guess i'll experience that when i see what this thing can do. i think it's rated 480mbps or something like that.two quick questions because i'm a little tired and out of time. i'll collect my thoughts tomorrow.1. editing fstab and mounting this thing. i've already formatted to ext3 with gparted but i'm having issues with that also. /dev/sde12. what exactly is meant by imaging, cloning, backup the entire os, etc? i'm confused about how these terms are being used.

Edited September 16, 2009 by cybormoron

[striker]

2. what exactly is meant by imaging, cloning, backup the entire os, etc? i'm confused about how these terms are being used.

- imaging: let's say it with this anology: 'taking a screen shot of the complete picture and store it elsewhere'. In imaging terms: making an exact copy of the system drive (and/or other drives) and store this exact copy elsewhere, on another drive. An example: making an image of the C:\ drive in Windows and store this image on D:\ .- cloning: making an exact copy of the to be cloned drive and at the same time restore that exact copy to another drive. This can also be a complete hard disk, for example when going for another larger drive in your computer. In that case you have to clone the drive, that means copying the contents of the 'old' drive to the 'new' drive. Even cloning all partitions on the whole disk is possible.- backup: backups are not images, period. Backups are pieces (files, folders) copied to some other place to be retrieved when disaster strikes. Nowadays I see even known respected businesses using the term 'backups' when in fact they mean to say 'images', very confusing. Some of these businesses sell imaging packages, and some of those packages have the capability to do both: backing up and - you guessed it - imaging. Technically you would have an image if backing up the complete OS, however, the file structure wouldn't be in there which would be in a real image. In other words, in the situation restoring all the backups to a new hard disk drive would very probably result in the OS not booting at all, where the real image would overcome this.- sector by sector copy: not mentioned above but nevertheless. A real image does not also 'copy' the page file and the hibernate file and the unused portions of the partition (free space for example) to be imaged(in Windows that is).However, a sector by sector copy does. Sometimes such a copy is needed. I remember one situation: the recovery partition of my laptop way back then. It was hidden of course, but I needed an image of it. The only possibility I was offered was a sector by sector copy of it.Hope this makes it a bit more clear. I'll see whether I can still gather that 'review' link for speeds.

[striker]

I couldn't find the link from way back then, but the following one gives at least an idea (for the drive I used):http://www.laptopmag.com/review/storage/we...port-elite.aspxedit:added the belowThis is what I meant:

Read/Write Speed: 55.6 MBps/11.3 MBps

You see the write speed for that drive is not great, the reading speed however is very good. In practice that means when reading or copying something off that drive takes little time, but writing/storing something to it takes much much longer. That's why it is important to take a look at those speeds, BTW: they have nothing to do with the USB througput, at least not directly. The Read/Write Speed for the drive is the important thing here, using a drive like this in a laptop would result in a slow rig when doing some video conversions for eample, simply because the write speed for that drive is slow. Watching a on that drive stored video however would be a good and probably no brainer experience because for that (reading) the drive is relatively fast.Another important thing to mention is what interface does the drive have? USB2.0, IEEE1394 (firewire, and which one, firewire 400 or 800), eSata?To make it short, the above mentioned order (USB2.0, IEEE1394 (firewire, and which one, firewire 400 or 800), eSata) goes up in working speed, so USB2.0 is not fast (on the contraire!), firewire is a bit quicker, but eSata is the quickest of the interfaces mentioned. O, but USB2.0 can do 480Mbs you say? Wrong, theoretically that is true, yes under an ideal lab condition, but in practice: just forget it. They top off at about 50 - 60Mbs if you're lucky, most of the time I see speeds at around 20-33Mbs in reading speed, so let's just forget to talk about writing speeds...With the approach of external drives we have two bottlenecks here: one being the actual read/write speed of the drive, and the second one being the actual throughput of the interface used.end of editBTW: If you need Acronis imaging software for a WD drive, you can get it for free at:http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp

[Yarg]

I use dd sometimes but it is prob the most inefficient because it copies everything on the drive including unused space which may still have old data in it. If your going to use dd its usually best to zero out the free space beforehand so that compressing it actually does something. A must have program for windows that can zero out free space is CCleaner. dd also takes a long time to restore because it writes back the entire drive no matter whats there. The advantage of the dd method is that the only tool you need is a Linux live cd or some way to get the drive attached to a running Linux system. Also it is usually easy to attach some kind of network storage on most live cds for storing the image, usb works too of course.

dd if=/dev/sda | gzip > /mnt/NetStorage/yourimage.dd.gz

I think is the command to do the backup and

gunzip /mnt/NetStorage/yourimage.dd.gz - | dd of=/dev/sda

restores it. (oh yah always make sure the drive is not mounted when doing it)PING or Partimage Is Not Ghost Is a nice tool similar to Ghost and the others but its linux based. I would check it out too. USB from what I have seen caps at about 30MB/sec (1/2 its advertised speed), 100mbit network caps at 12.5MB/sec. As for testing the image, unless you have a spare laptop drive sitting around you wont be able to without putting the current install at risk...edit:added code tags

Edited September 16, 2009 by Yarg

[striker]

Yarg, that is good info you offered! To add something: there's a thread going on between Colin and Frank about doing a PartImage, a step-by-step offered by Frank. That one ought to be a stickyhttp://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.ph...c=28164&hl=

[cybormoron]

thanks guysi've been scratching my head on this. i don't think partimage is what i want to use because i gather that the partitions and mbr must remain intact. if i alter the partitions and mbr then i probably won't be able to restore. is this correct?if so this means that dd is what i want to do. thanks Yarg, that looks like the command i need. i'm not too concerned about speed or space. i can run it overnight and the laptop is only a 37gb drive, the external drive is 1.3tb. i'll probably do this from the ubuntu live cd:where sdx is how ubuntu sees the windows xp partition and /foo/foo1/ is how ubuntu sees the external drive.

dd if=/dev/sdX | gzip > /foo/foo1/nateslaptop.dd.gz

i wonder if i can test this in a virtualbox virtual machine on my linux computer? hmmm, maybe i'll play with this awhile.one issue i'm having is how do i mount this external drive on my linux machine? i would like it to auto mount when i plug it in. is that possible? i've figured out how to mount it as root but i'd like to be able to mount it as normal user if i can't auto-mount.so the question is; how do i mount as normal user?as root i do

# mount /dev/sde1 /media/external

i've tried several different options in /etc/fstab but i must not be doing those right. i've tried users instead of user, auto instead of noauto. i haven't tried uid or gid yet./etc/fstab

# entry by steve for external drive sde1 16sep09/dev/sde1 /media/external auto noauto,user,rw,exec 0 0

[cybormoron]

hmmmm, i've just discovered autofs and pmount. i wonder if they will solve my mount problem?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pmounthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_(computing)http://www.linfo.org/mounting.htmlhttp://pmount.alioth.debian.org/http://www.examplenow.com/mountstriker...just noticed your acronis for WD link. that may be very helpful, thanks.

[cybormoron]

how do i mount this external drive as normal user? i can't get it to work.my current fstab

# entry by steve for external drive sde1 16sep09/dev/sde1 /media/external ext3 uid=500,gid=500,users,auto,rw,exec 0 0

[Bruno]

With the correct uid and gid it should work . . . . you could add "umask=0" but that only makes a difference once the partition is mounted. Bruno

[cybormoron]

[steve@localhost ~]$ iduid=500(steve) gid=500(steve) groups=500(steve)[steve@localhost ~]$

i've tried different options to no avail including umask=0, noauto, user, users, defaults, etc.so i must be approaching this wrong. do i plug this drive after i boot up or leave it plugged in? if i leave it plugged in my computer won't boot. it hangs at the splash screen and i have shut off with the power button, unplug the usb, then power on.