Ubuntu

Ubuntu in Inspiron 1721?

Asked by odlanier

Hi everyone,

I want to testdrive Ubuntu in my Dell Inspiron 1721 which I painfully switched to XP as It comes only with factory Vista preinstalled. I am new to Linux and Ubuntu and find really worrysome to install Linux using long forsaken DOS commands.

Q1.- Is there any way to have Linux installed unattended? (that is, without me needing to type those set of script commands which makes the whole thing go beserk whenever one single dot is not typed correctly)

Q2.- Is there any free WIndows emuler in Linux (appart from Wine) that I can use? I need to use AutoCAD and SketchUp for architecture and they don't run in Linux.

I have donloaded and prepared the .iso image for UBUNTU 8.04 for AMD 64 but am not sure whether it's live CD or just the ordinary UBUNTU. I booted the laptop with it and got scared it may erase my partitions.

Q3.- How do I check the partitions I have BEFORE installing anything?

Q4.- Are there any known issues about XP not booting after UBUNTU istallation? (I've read a few of them in the forums for the Inspiron 1520)

Q5.- Has anyone had any experience with dual boot (UBUNTU/XP) on the Inspiron 1721?

Thanks

Odlanier

Dell Inspiron 1721, AMD dual Athlon 64, 1.8Mhz
ATI Radeon 1270, 256Mb
HDD 160Gb on XP Nl Professional.
SoundBlaster Audigy

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Nick Ellery (nick.ellery) said : 		#1

1. Ubuntu isn't like that, and installation and installation is all graphical. You'd be surprised at how easy it is.

2. There is Cedega, but it is a commercial product. So the answer would be no. There is, of course, the option of dualbooting

About the Live CD, you can run it having no fear of anything wrong happening. They don't touch your partitions, as the CD is running from your RAM. You will need to burn the .iso image to a disk, then restart your computer into the CD. Have a look below for help on this.

3. You can check your partitions by going to System > Administration > Partition Editor.

4. There is always a small chance that something could go wrong, however, following instructions in the link provided below will reduce that risk to almost nothing.

5. I dualboot Ubuntu and Vista on an Inspiron 1521.. works like a charm. Dell laptops have extremely good support with Ubuntu.

Have a look at this for everything you need to know about switching from windows It's the official Switching from Windows Guide: https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/switching/index.html

Installation is much easier than you think, and the chance of something going wrong is extremely low.

Revision history for this message
R2 (rajarshiray2001) said : 		#2

i have been trying to run Autocad ( vers. - 2000, 2004 and 2006 ) using wine / vbox but having problems.

please refer to the link below as well , as the problems seem common and i hope together a solution can be worked out .

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/virtualbox-ose/+question/83242

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