KWTm's Journal: My Dellbuntu laptop: installing Kubuntu

Installing Kubuntu:
- the plan is to shrink the built-in Ubuntu partition on /dev/sda6 down to 6GB (my original plan was 4GB, but there's a frigg'n 4.3GB of files in there already! What did they load on there, some voice-recognition stuff?)
- expand the swap partition to 4GB (since there's 2GB of RAM in there)
- then add another 4GB partition to install Kubuntu
- then the remaining 130+ GB is for data

- running from the Kubuntu 7.04 Live DVD, QTParted is unable to resize the main 151GB partition! --can't move, can't resize; I can only choose to delete it if anything. The partition was not mounted, so not sure why I couldn't manipulate it.
- so we need some other tools for managing it, instead of QTParted. I bought PartitionExpert from Acronis (in 2003, it was $45, downloaded from web), which is able to handle Ext3 as well as ReiserFS partitions. At the time, Partition Magic (which was v6 at the time) was not able to do ReiserFS. Anyway, so in this step I was not able to move ahead with any FLOSS disk partition manager known to me. (Any suggestions for other partition managers I should try, in the future?)
- using Partition Expert: surprise! The 4.3GB of data turned out to be only about 1.7GB, taking up less room than I thought. I was able to shrink the gUbuntu partition (/dev/sda6) down to 4GB, create a new 4GB partition for Kubuntu (/dev/sda7), and make the remaining 135GB partition (/dev/sda8) for data.

(Here are partial results for "df -h", listing device, total size, used size, remaining size, %used, and mount point.) /dev/sda1 47M 876K 47M 2% /media/sda1 /dev/sda2 2.0G 693M 1.4G 34% /media/sda2 /dev/sda3 193M 21M 163M 12% /media/sda3 /dev/sda6 4.0G 1.7G 2.1G 45% /media/sda6 /dev/sda7 4.0G 2.8G 1000M 74% / /dev/sda8 135G 3.4G 132G 3% /media/sda8
(/dev/sda4 is not listed. That's the swap partition, which I increased to 4GB.)

- it took a long, LOOOooooo..ng time to do it, though. Using Partition Expert, I first clicked on the "big" partition (at the time it was /dev/sda6, 150GB), just to say, "I'll work with that partition". A window popped up: "analyzing partition", and then it froze. At least, it looked like it. Actually, it really was analyzing the partition, except it took 20 minutes! So, beware not to click on the wrong partition by accident.
- and then once I specified how I wanted the partitions set up, it took another 40 minutes or so. Not sure --it took so long that I lost track.

- Once everything was resized, Kubuntu installed smoothly.
- Previously, installing Kubuntu on my desktop boxes, I did very little manually; instead, I typed commands into a script and then ran the script, eventually accumulating a long record of my installation steps in a shell script. This paid off now as I copied and pasted large chunks of this script into a similar installation script for the Dellbuntu, and it took only about half a dozen steps (with big sections of nothing but "sudo apt-get --assume-yes install" lines) to reproduce my desktop configuration on the Dellbuntu.
- by installing the 915resolution package ("sudo apt-get install 915resolution"), I got to use the full resolution of 1280x800 \
- I previously worried about the screen being too small, but I guess with the full resolution the screen looks pretty big. I'm rather pleasantly surprised. My desktop has a 19" monitor capable of 1280x1024, but the Linux driver for the onboard graphics card can only drive it at 1024x768. I never realized till now how much screen size is dependent on resolution rather than just physical size.
- By the way, I chose the normal matte screen rather than the default Dell TrueLife(tm) Screen With Sharper Colours And Annoying Reflection. I'm glad! The screen is readable in a variety of lighting conditions.
- while on the subject of hardware, the keyboard feels nice. The one minor thing I have to get used to is the mousepad: occasionally, one of my thumbs accidentally touch it while I type, and the computer thinks I clicked on the mouse button.

Next step: installing Beryl! (Of course! That's the whole point of getting a laptop with Linux on it --to show off! :) )