winders-free. you know you want it. dayum. i decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and install the ubuntu linux to my computer. →[More:]

i followed instructions and cleared away as much detritus as i could from my poor hard drive and defragged that sucker. it's a relatively tiny 40 gigger. with high hopes i began the install after carefully reading all i could about dual booting it with winderz.

everything rolled along just fine until we got to partitioning: my drive was one big ntfs partition so i needed to shrink it and create linux partitions. the instructions were very precise, but to my dismay, the install program did not offer me the option to resize the partition as it was supposed to, instead issuing dire warnings of lost data should i proceed beyond that point.

frustrated, i booted back into winders and planned to just buy a second drive. some hours later, i came upon some documentation on the ubuntu wiki which indicated that one must proceed past the dire warning before one gets the opportunity to resize. the warning is out of sequence!

by this time it was midnight, but in went the install cd and away we went. resized, created swap area, created linux partition with 20 gigs, held breath while install completed. rebooted. twice: once to linux, once to to winders. viola! it survived and so did all my data!

after some additional foofing around trying to access the windows partition from the linux desktop (it was mounted but "unreadable") i found some docs on how to edit a text file called fstab (file system table, oooo i feel all geeky) to allow that, restarted and wheeee! all my data! under linux!

gleefully i opened word doc files with open office abandon, joyously i edited my stewie wallpaper in the gimp (just for the halibut).

angrily i tried to get my mp3 files to open in musicbox instead of a movie player! hee hee! (it turns out i had to install a buncha codecs and stuff, something a totally braindead republican could do while looting an old womans social security account thanks to the synaptic package manager thingy.) soon my mp3's were pumpin' up the jams (it was now like 4am).

i imported the bookmarks, chrome modifications, and adblock settings from my winders firefox into my linux firefox by copying a few files. i fell asleep around 7am.

having just awakened and breakfasted (3pm) i'm about to move my email and address books which looks to be dead simple as well.

i also just discovered that i can use the file browser (like winders explorer, only not) to SSH directly into my leased server and browse around and do my web site stuff, like, upload this screenshot.

quonsar is geeked! oh yes! a week or so of confidence building and this disk is gonna get repartitioned to a 40 gig linux file system!