Second step, update the BIOS to the latest version (1.20 when writing this message).
In this procedure, the entire hard drive is used, this means, everything available is erased.
To be able to run Ubuntu without problems if you have Intel video chip and ATI video card, it is important to et set to 'discrete' the video card in the BIOS. Otherwise, you might never see X window after installation...
By the way, it is not necessary to switch the Hard Drive in IDE mode in BIOS if you don't plan to
Ubuntu installer is quite easy and self explicit not to require any explanation. Nevertheless, it might be useful to define your own partition table instead of converting the entire Hard Drive space into 1 partition. Dedicated partitions can have significant improvements on Linux usability and further manipulation of recovery.
The Hard Drive in this laptop is a 320 MB, so, here is the partition table used, in this specific order:
- / 10240 MB (10 GB)
- /boot 1024 MB (1 GB)
- /swap 2048 MB (2 GB)*
- /usr 20480 MB (20 GB)
- /var 10240 MB (10 GB)
- /tmp 5120 MB (5 GB)
- /usr/local 5120 MB (5 GB)
- /home available left space
* = even if there is 3 GB of RAM, it is not necessary to increase the swap space above 2 GB, the max useful amount.
Note:
For partition description, you can refer to this excellent (French) guide:
or to the huge amount of Linux help around the web.
Finally, once you have followed all the simple steps, you can reboot and run a fresh Ubuntu on this laptop. Every hardware is detected without problems.
Later we will see what to setup to make some things run smoother or use the ATI acceleration functions.
