Recently, I bought a new ThinkPad. Much to the chagrin of the bf, I didn't start using it right away. It sat on a pile of boxes while I planned my attack.
See, I wanted to reinstall Windows—to get rid of crapplets—before I filled the disk full of stuff.
And, I wanted to set up the machine to dual-boot Ubuntu.
I wasn't entirely successful with the clean XP install. I mostly followed the guides listed below. But I must have done something wrong, because after my install, Windows would only start in safe mode. And when I looked at the install log, it was complaining about several crucial DLLs not being right. (I no longer have the error messages, because I cleared them out, or I'd list them here for posterity.)
- How to Create a Bootable Windows XP Setup CD/DVD on a System with Windows Pre-loaded
- Thinkpad T60P (200793U) Windows XP Install
- A Squeaky Clean ThinkPad X60 Tablet with No Craplets
But then I remembered that the bf and I had actually bought an OEM XP CD to install under Parallels on his MacBook. Oh yes, I could use that!
So I did, and everything was happy.
Once past that hurdle, I followed the article My Ubuntu Installation on Thinkpad R60: Dual boot with WinXP to set up the dual-boot.
It only took me 3 tries.
The first time, I managed to download a bad Ubuntu installer image. The lesson learned there was that before burning a CD and trying to use it to install an operating system, you should check the MD5.
The second time, I missed that it didn't keep all the attributes about what I wanted to do with my partitions from the first time. The partitions (obviously) were still there, but I missed that I needed to re-fill-out some of the details about how Linux should use them.
The third time, it worked like a charm!
Now, let me tell you, Linux has come a !!!LONG!!! way since the last time I looked at it—which was something like SUSE 7.1.
Quite a lot of things really did work, right out of the box.
I followed the guide Installing Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on a ThinkPad T61 at ThinkWiki—very helpful.
I had a few travails—which if I'm feeling motivated, I'll post about later—but I'm amazed at how many things are working:
- Wireless networking
- Printing to an IPP HP LaserJet printer on the network
- VPNing into work and remote desktopping into my work computer
- Suspending (well sometimes anyway)
- Automounting network shares
I want to give a big shout-out and "Thank You!" to everyone in the Linux, Ubuntu, and ThinkPad community who helped make this possible. It's beautiful.
And I even let myself order the Tux Babydoll T-Shirt from ThinkGeek in celebration.
Cheers!
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