Zerker on 2/1/2009 at 14:52

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Okay, experiment done. Here is a pictorial partitioning guide for your viewing pleasure:

First, before doing anything else, defrag all your Windows drives, or you may not be able to resize them. Doing a backup to another machine or external hard drive is never a bad idea either. Finally, if you're planning to reinstall Windows, do that first so it doesn't mess up the Linux bootloader.

Anyhow, once you boot to the (X)ubuntu live CD and start the install process, you will be prompted for some generic information like time zone and stuff. Eventually, you'll get to the following partition manager screen:

http://www.zerker.ca/misc/linux-1.png

Make sure to select manual partitioning. You will be presented with a list of your existing partitions. Select one you want to resize and click Edit partition to get this:

http://www.zerker.ca/misc/linux-2.png

Enter the new partition size, then select the same file system as before (probably FAT32) under use as, do NOT format the drive, and select a mount point (/windows is probably good). This will ensure the drive will show up in Linux so you can see the data there. If there is a partition you want to see but NOT resize, you can do the same thing without changing the size, and giving it a different mount point (you can type your own directories, but make sure to use a forward slash). It will prompt you to write the changes to disk afterwards.

You can also use the delete partition button to delete any existing partitions you no longer want, or use the edit partition on those and choose a different file system if you want to re-use them for something else in Linux. My "guide" is simply assuming you have free space for the Linux stuff.

So, select some "free space" in the partition manager, click "new partition", and voila:

http://www.zerker.ca/misc/linux-3.png

For the main linux partition, you want it mounted in "/", ext3 format (although there are other choices if you wanted to read about them), and whatever size you wanted (5 Gb or so). Note that the virtual hard drive I tested this with wasn't very big, so I ended up being forced to choose sizes that were too small for a viable linux system. Anyways, click new again to set the swap area:

http://www.zerker.ca/misc/linux-4.png

Same idea, but choose "swap area", and an appropriate size (2x ram is what most people recommend). In this case, you'll probably just be taking everything that's left.

Anyways, you should end up with the final partition scheme displayed. Here's mine:

http://www.zerker.ca/misc/linux-5.png

Yours will have your two hard drives and all that jazz. Hopefully that's clear enough. Once you're good with the hard drive setup, just confirm it and continue with the installation.

Matthew on 2/1/2009 at 17:02

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Those screenshots of gparted look a lot funkier than the one I use. :erm:

Zerker on 3/1/2009 at 14:53

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Matthew, those are just from the Xubuntu installer. I figured if he can do everything there, there's no need to use the GParted Live CD as well.

Onto the issue at hand, I've had the text issue on my eee PC, but it DOES have a small screen. You should still be able to get through the installer with that text size, even if the rest of the system looks weird... unless it's REALLY REALLY big. To move windows around when they are too large, hold alt then you can drag the window from any position.

Anyways, to change the text resolution, go into Settings -> Settings Manager from the XFCE menu, then select User Interface. Choose a reasonable Font DPI here (probably 96 or 75). I think this normally only takes effect when you log in, but since this is a Live CD, try doing "ctrl + alt + backspace" to restart the X server. You can also use the "display" icon to change your screen resolution, so long as Linux set up a suitable graphics driver that supports things properly.

Or you can use the Alternate installer (a different ISO on the site) to install from a Text interface and tweak the system post-install. The instructions above still mostly hold true, except you will be getting a plainer interface to do the same operations.

Al_B on 4/1/2009 at 00:35

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Good details from Zerker there.

One thing I found however when I was installing Ubuntu recently was that the grub bootloader didn't like my main linux partition being on /dev/sda5. There was (is?) a limitation on only being able to have four primary partitions and once I made sure my Linux root partition was on one of them grub was able to install successfully.

Zerker on 4/1/2009 at 14:58

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Okay, if the GUI is unusable, you may want to use the alternate installer as I mentioned. Regardless of what you use, you'll need to know how to fix this one way or another, so here goes. If you do still use the Live CD and fix it there, note that you will need to do it again on the regular install the same way.

First, some useful hotkeys:
ctrl + alt + F1 -> F6 : open a terminal session
ctrl + alt + F7 : return to the default GUI session
ctrl + alt + backspace : restart the GUI/X Windows (as mentioned above)

So, hit ctrl + alt + F1 to start up a terminal session and leave the GUI behind (for the moment).
If you've never used a Linux terminal before, it's very similar to the DOS prompt, except you use forward slashes (/) for directories and type "ls" for directory listings instead of "dir". Also note that case is important, so make sure you type file names with the correct case. You can google a guide for more information, but this should get you what you want:

First off, you should start in your "home" directory (/home/{username}, where {username} is ubuntu for the Live CD). What we are going to do is manually set the DPI preference.

Change to the directory that contains the setting:
cd .config/xfce4

Edit the font settings:
nano Xft.xrdb

Nano is a little quirky, but you should be able to get your editing done (and it's much easier than the other command-line editors). Insert the following line (or edit an existing line):

Xft.dpi: 96

Press ctrl + X to quit nano, and save changes when prompted. Switch back to the GUI with ctrl + alt + F7, then press ctrl + alt + backspace to restart the GUI. If you are using the Live CD, you need to log back in as the "ubuntu" user (no password), otherwise use your regular login.

(http://xubuntulinux.blogspot.com/2006/07/ubuntu-set-correct-dpi-for-x-server.html) Here's some more information for you. Once you get it switched, I'd be interested to see what DPI the xdpyinfo command reports for you. In my case, it reports 75 x 75 for my desktop monitor and 133 x 135 for the eee PC (which I forced down to 100).