1. Boot into windows and burn the suggested backup disc for the embedded media player.

2. Defragment the hard disc (although it should already be OK)

Now assuming you have downloaded the iso for kubuntu breezy and burnt to CD (or obtained the CD in some other manner, pop it in and boot up).

Simply follow the install process.

Note that I did not partition the hard disc here since I had done it previously – actually from the command line under gentoo using the ntfs resize command line utility, and then fdisk. If you want to follow what I did, here are the specs (although you could probably do better):

Original partitioning:

1 * 1 7272 NTFS 55GBytes

First use ntfsresize to drop the NTFS partition down to 15GBytes, then go into fdisk and repartition to:

1 * 1 1826 NTFS 15GBytes

2 1827 7115 ext3 40GBytes (approx)

3 7116 7272 extended

5 7116 7248 swap 512MBytes (approx)

6 7249 7272 fat16 hidden

It's likely you can simply achieve exactly the same thing with the kubuntu partitioning tools, and if so should do that. I left the few sectors at the end because I noted that the NTFS file system did not seem to entirely fill the hard disc partition. I don't know why but assumed that it was either for undelete information, for the embedded media player or for some bios feature. Whatever, I didn't want to overwrite it so left it hidden and unused.

Later when assigning mount points, the NTFS partition went to /media/sda1, the ext3 partition was mounted as / and the swap as swap.

On install, kubuntu recognised almost all of the hardware, including the touchpad, extra USB mouse, display, wireless card, ethernet and sound. Basically everything except the card reader and firewire which I didn't check for.

I used GRUB as the bootloader, and installed this on the master boot record of the drive. It was lucky I used GRUB because this is easily adaptable before linux boots – if I had used lilo I would have experienced significantly more pain!!

When I rebooted after install the problems began.

The boot failed. Basically, it complained that disc /dev/hda could not be found. Well the reason is the SATA discs I believe which get mounted as /dev/sda instead....

So we need to modify the GRUB install. But first we should boot (as well as we are able). To boot, simply enter to the command prompt (first using the password if you have one installed). First set the root device correctly (if should be right anyway) as the second partition on the hard disc drive:

root (hd0,1)

Then setup the location of kernel and ramdiskL

kernel /vmlinuz

initrd /initrd.img

boot

There will be some errors and so on, but once booted into the initial ramdisk, I mounted the actual hard disc and changed the GRUB getting...

mkdir /mnt

mount -text3 /dev/sda2 /mnt

chroot /mnt /bin/bash

cd /boot/grub

vi menu.1st

and in there change every occurrence of /dev/hda to /dev/sda

Type exit, reboot (or power cycle) the laptop, and GRUB should now be capable of booting kubuntu (although you may have to try the recovery boot option first time – just see how it goes).

Other stuff you could do

I needed to download some extra software and, not having used kubuntu, ubuntu or debian before, this was non-obvious. As an aid to others, here's what I did.

1. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list to uncomment the universe and backports sections. This opens up a wide variety of extra software that can be downloaded.
2. Edit /etc/sudoers to add your username (so you can give your password to get root access instead of issuing roots password all the time!). If your username is 'bob', then the line should be something like

   bob    ALL=(ALL) ALL

3. Next run K->Utilities->Package Manager, type a package name, click on it, click 'install package' and then click on Commit Changes to make it so.