OS choices?

OK, the replacement laptop has Windows Vista already installed so the question is whether to wipe or dual boot. I decided to dual boot mostly so I could play with Vista Gadgets and also to still be able to help others with Windows.

Now lets get to the good stuff. Downloaded gparted-0.3.7 from sourceforge and ran from an external CD/DVD drive I borrowed from my bro (thanx man!). Keep an eye on the screen when the mini is booting and press F9 to get the boot options menu. Select the external drive and hit .

The details of gparted depend on what your goal is for partitioning your drive. I ended up with about a 45GB NTFS partition for Vista of which over 20GB is OS, sheesh 20+ really??? There is also a small HP_RESTORE partition that I left alone.

Then I created a 75GB FAT32 data drive where I'll keep everything like music, movies and general files for any OS to access.

At the recommendation of the linux guru at work, I made a 10GB ext3 root(/) partition for the linux OS and like about 5GB /home partition. He said this is separated out so you can recompile the OS without losing your /home settings and files. I will definitely be learning more about this as I dig deeper into learning the linux kernel.

Lastly, the general recommendation for swap space is to match your RAM so I made a 2GB /swap partition. The remaining unallocated drive space is for playing with other flavors of linux.

OK, slight bummer, HP SLED 10 DVD is full restore disk so it wanted to wipe the entire drive. You can download the iso from hp.com but wasn't impressed with Suse enough to go through all that. Alternative: Ubuntu!

Man there are some SMART people out there!! I followed the instructions on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/HP2133 exactly so I won't repeat anything here. End result following site instructions step-for-step was that all worked perfectly.

Summary: I have a dual boot Windows Vista and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) mini laptop! Much better solution than all the UMPCs I've been looking at! :>

Oh and for fun I installed http://www.yawcam.com/ on Windows side and it worked without a hitch. Linux side coming soon.