Partition to install unbuntu

Hi there.
I have 1 partition on my machine, on it i have XP home and programs and files ETC
I have about 30GB free space. so is it possible to make another partition with this space to install unbuntu?

 

Short answer: yes. Long answer: defrag your WinXP partition first

 

Technically you don't HAVE to create a partition prior to installing Ubuntu or any other modern OS. The installers let you play with the partitions, but if you're not extremely careful you could end up gobbling up every free byte and leaving literally zero extra space on the original OS's drive.

I've had luck with using the Parted Magic iso on a bootable USB drive via UNetBootin, but your choice of partition manager shouldn't make a big difference. The Parted Magic site does have good advice/info on how to partition your drives. I found the site informative for partition purpose and breakdown, although I don't know how useful some of it is for a computer intended for light usage such as the AAO - specifically the creation of the swap partition. Ubuntu can handle a swap file without a designated partition with some degree of efficiency. I assume since you have >30 GB that you also have at least 1GB of RAM (I haven't heard of HDD models with less for the AAO. yet.). Truth be told, I've never seen my swap file go above the 0 byte mark. I've never even seen my RAM go above the 60% mark (out of 1GB). Most of that is just because of the nature of the machine - you just won't be pushing the memory to the max 90% of the time, and if you do go over, a swap file will do just as well as a partition.
That said, I do have a swap partition, and I chose to retain when I re-modified my HDD structure. 1-2GB is pretty much the same amount you lose to a Windows paging file or hibernate file. You won't really mind losing it, IMO. The /home partition is nice to have as well, but I don't know how critical is it to have it.
The best suggestion in there was to minimize the size of the OS partition for each OS and put your files in a separate place. I run Vista/Ubuntu with a GRUB bootloader. Now, when I have Vista hibernated under Ubuntu, I can't access files on that drive (you can't mount hibernated drives). Pain in the butt. Putting files I need for both OSes on separate FAT32 or other partition system. Same with Ubuntu - I can't really use FSDrive to access my Ubuntu partition if I want to hibernate Vista b/c the drives stay locked up.

Defragging, as RockDoctor suggested, will make it all go much faster though. Modifying partitions without defragging just means you'll have to wait for the file fragments to get shifted around by fairly inefficient partitioning software - you don't want to do that. GParted will just sit there churning through the night if you have fragments all over the drive.

 

All done. I actually did it before anyone posted here and i did defrag first!
Ive decided im just gunna have ubuntu and default progs on this partition and just use online applications for faster speed.
Few more questions
1)is the current version of ubuntu on the One quite stable/good?
2)how do i get a boot loader? (thats where it asks what OS you want to load into right?)

 

actually i made a mistake, it's my fault for going off memory. Parted Magic is a good tool, no doubt about that. The site that had the partition info was http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/partitioning. Digging through my browser history is a pain in the butt.

1) If you follow the instructions on the AspireOne page https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne (basically a compilation of the info in the Hardy Heron thread on this forum), you'll be mostly smooth sailing. Anyone can follow the instructions, it's just pretty much straight copy paste. It's very stable, and pretty much everything works on mine except for the hardware wifi switch, getting the onboard mic and jacked mic to function properly (you have to choose one or the other), and some minor popups if you have an SD card in the slot on resume. Intrepid Ibex is still in Alpha, but apparently people have had decent success with Alpha6. I'm probably going to just wait a month for the release though. OneLinux is in the works and looks promising, although I haven't seen updates for it in the last two weeks. For now, Hardy Heron (8.04.1 LTS) is your best bet, with the AspireOne modifications.
2) GRUB is (i believe) the default boot loader for Ubuntu. During the install it'll probably autodetect your WinXP partition and list it as an option for bootup.

*edit*
technically the Windows Bootloader is supposed to be able to boot Ubuntu, but I prefer GRUB.

 

Hmm. so there are things that do not work wih ubuntu. this is annoying.
Is there any OS other than linpus(making the usb recovery breaks my hard drives) and XP(which i already have) that have full support and work well?

 

Ubuntu's list of shortcomings is the shortest, mostly because the Ubuntu/AA1 community has been working on drivers for the hardware. The problems listed aren't really problems at all - most people don't use the onboard mic, WiFi still turns off by software, and thus far the SD has yet to stop working.

 

does the internal mic not work at all then?

 

It does work. The only problem is that it tends to be very noisy as compared to a dedicated external mic, so I choose to use a headset.