My S10e goes Ubuntu, You can too..Really

Been almost a year since I got my S10e and it's been great to have, while in London for the summer, Chicago for MWLUG, Lotusphere 2009, clients and flights.

But I was kind of lazy about updating it's OS, drive and loading Linux on it.

Now that I had a spare drive, and encouragement from Darren, who did it the other day, I figured it's time.

The spare drive is bigger than the default drive and came from my HP and runs Vista on it. I wanted to see if it would work first under Vista and with nothing changed it just worked. I need some screen drivers, etc.. but it was fine. Good thing as it's going to Windows 7 next.

Before I start this, if you put this on a USB you can run it from a USB if you don't want to mess with your hard drive. It's a bit slow, but works well.

Back to Ubuntu, go to this site, http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook to grab the latest file for your netbook. Download the .iso file to your PC.

It then has a link to this page to help you put it on a USB. I had no luck with this, but did when I went to this page and the UnetBootin program as I did this on a Windows machine, Linux server is, um, in parts right now.

The program is straight forward, just tell it where the .iso file is and where your USB is. The program will set up the USB to boot and run Ubuntu. Once you boot your laptop with the USB, you will have the option to install Ubuntu on your PC itself.

So you have the USb ready to go, now set your laptop or pc to boot from the USB drive. Plug it in and wait for it to start.

Great graphical UI, and one item which shows on the main window asks to install Ubuntu to a PC. Let it do it. It has a built-in partition selector and divider so you can run it in parallel with Windows. Or just wipe your drive and go whole hog. I shared space.

Also updates will come, especially to Firefox so maybe wait for the updates to install before trying to install and download more. Once you can get online, go get the Linux code for Sametime, Notes and anything else you want.

Ubuntu also will let you interact with your windows partition so I have the best of both worlds right now. Go play and learn. I'm much happier with this version than one I tried on my previous Linux box.

So next up is to find out just what else I can toss on this machine and demo, work, maybe the big HP laptop will have to go Ubuntu soon too.

One last link, in case you need it:
Notes install issues