Install Linux on AA1 with XP on

Hi,

I have an AA1 with XP pre-installed. I would like to install kubuntu (or ubuntu) on the same machine and have a dual boot option. How do I go about it? I have limited ubuntu experience.
I have access to a USB DVD drive so I can use an live image directly from there (no USB stick required).

Thanks for your hep!

Andrea

 

The Ubuntu installer should walk you through it... the partitioning step is the critical one. I haven't done a dual-boot in a long time, but I think it'll give you the option of shrinking the Windows partition and installing Ubuntu in the recovered space. It should automatically put an entry for Windows into the grub menu for you.

Or...

You could pop the Ubuntu CD in while in Windows, and use Wubi to install Ubuntu within your Windows partition. I played around with this setup once just to see what it was like, and it was pretty impressive. On a machine with potentially slower disk IO, there may (or may not) be a performance hit. This setup adds an Ubuntu entry to the Windows boot loader, and also adds the whole Ubuntu installation to Add/Remove Programs so you can uninstall it if you want. I believe there's also a way to convert from this setup to a tradition one later, giving Ubuntu its own partition. I don't know much about that, though.

 

Hi,

great, thanks for the very useful information! I will give it a try.

Andrea

 

wubi worked flawlessly on my aspire1 that has xp. I think that having your os in an ntfs file container increases the boot time a bit though. Its alot safer to use wubi though since they have no xp restore discs for this puppy. also forgot to mention that with wubi you dont even need an external cdrom it loads it all for you over the web.