[ Sarangbee's blog ]

INTRO

The following describes the installation of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on a Lenovo Thinkpad x61s with a dual boot between Ubuntu and Windows Vista. However, it does contain information useful even for those who are not running the author's specific setup. This pages is written in English, but the author plans to create a corresponding page in Japanese within a short while. This is the author's first attempt at a wiki of any sorts and he is also relatively new to linux (3 months), so please feel free to edit, comment, delete, or add as generously as you wish. The target audience is beginners to intermediate level linux users.

SPECS

The Thinkpad was purchased new from Lenovo in August, 2007. Here are the specs.

• Model: X61s
• Operating System: Vista Basic 32 Bit
• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz L7500 4MB L2 Cache 800MHz FSB
• Chipset: Intel i965M
• Memory: 2GB DDR2 PC5300 2 Slots, 0 Open 4GB Max
• Hard Drive: 120GB Hitachi 5400 RM
• Screen: 12” XGA UltraLight 1024x768 180 nits
• Graphics Card: Intel X3100
• Wireless: Intel 4965AGN
• Inputs: 88 Key Keyboard, PointStick with UltraNav Buttons
• Ports:

  • o Three USB Ports – One Left Side, Two Right Side o Four Pin FireWire o Ethernet and Modem o VGA Out o Headphone and Microphone Jacks

• Slots:

  • o SD Card Reader o Express Card Slot o Dock Connector

• Battery : Eight Cell
• Dimensions With Eight Cell Battery:

  • o Width – 10.5” o Depth – 9.4” o Height – 0.8”(Front) / 1.4”(Rear)

• Weight: 3.3 Lbs.

RESIZING　WINDOWS VISTA.

The computer shipped with a 5GB lenovo recovery partition in NTFS and a 115GB Vista partition. I had to ask Lenovo for backup disks because they did not ship with the computer, just in case I goofed everything up and had to start from scratch. Vista's disk manager partition utility would not let me shrink the Vista partition any less than 75 GB, so I downloaded the gparted live boot cd from the following site.

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gparted/gparted-livecd-0.3.4-9.iso?modtime=1192727517&big_mirror=0

Then I downloaded ISO Recorder from the following site.

http://www.versiontracker.com/php/dlpage.php?id=56822&db=win&pid=86362&kind=&lnk=http%3A%2F%2Fisorecorder.alexfeinman.com%2Fdownload%2FISORecorderV3RC1x86.zip

Then I bought an external CDROM drive, burned the gparted .iso image onto a blank CD, changed my bios to boot from the CDROM drive (easy), and started gparted partition editor.

I left the the 5 GB recovery partition in place because you'll need it in the future here, and I resized the Vista NTFS partition to 35GB, then added (in this order) a 256MB ext2 partition, a 3GB swap partition, a 25GB ext2 partition, and a 50GB FAT32 partition so that Vista and Ubuntu could both access shared file system. (I used the gparted livecd instead of the Ubuntu CD because I've had pretty good experience with it in the past and it's pretty self explanatory to use.) So when I finished the partitioning and rebooted, fragile Vista gave me the black screen of death stating in more or less words that it could not boot. So I booted into Lenovo Recovery environment via the Thinkvantage key at bootup and told it to reset my hard drive to the original factory state. When the options informed me that it had detected extra partitions, I told it just to rewrite the C: drive, which would now be the Vista 35GB NTFS partition. After it finished I rebooted into a nicely bridled Vista environment.

COMMENTS ABOUT VISTA

Even though I do not use it a lot am pleasantly surprised at how Vista is running on my computer. It is a little slow, has some annoying pop ups, only uses 32bits of my processors, and has trouble detecting my USB thumb drive, but other than that everything is cool. The wireless works great. The suspend and hibernate work, the volume, microphone, extra keyboard, mouse, internet, skype, openoffice suite and everything exceed my expectations. I am using Japanese on a regular basis and it's smooth also. I'm not a Microsoft fan by any stretch but I am happy that Microsoft and Lenovo gave the effort to make things work on this mid ranged laptop.

INSTALLING UBUNTU

Anyways, I reinstalled ISO recorder from the above link in Vista and then downloaded the Ubuntu 7.10 .iso image for AMD64 from Ubuntu's main web site. I burned it, then booted from the Ubuntu CD via the bios settings and began Ubuntu's beautifully simple and elegant installation process. At the partitioning prompt, I chose the manual option and formatted the following partitions and labeled the mount points.

/dev/sda1 (Leave it alone!) /dev/sda2 (Leave it alone!) /dev/sda3 (256MB boot partition, formated to "ext2" and mounted at "/boot") /dev/sda4 (Leave it alone. It's really an extended partition.) /dev/sda5 (3GB swap, leave it alone.) /dev/sda6 (25GB root partition, formated to "ext2" and mounted at "/") /dev/sda7 (50GB extra partition, mounted at "/mine")

The rest of the installation of Ubuntu is pretty straight forward. When Ubuntu installer prompted me to reboot, I did so and happily found that Grub had detected both Vista and Lenovo Recovery and I was able to boot into either without any extra configuration. Once back into Ubuntu, I downloaded the "tpb" program with Synaptic which enabled the use of the special Thinkpad keys with no extra configuration.

COMMENTS ABOUT UBUNTU 7.10

Unlike many in the forums, I am jolly happy at this point. I am getting download speeds exceeding 2000 kb/s (yeah!) from Japan's server over here in southern Kyushu. Wireless works, accessing my 50GB partition works, sleep, internet, graphics card, SD card reader, USB drive recognition, extra mouse and keyboard, language support are all great. There are a few things to be desired, though. The battery life in Vista is upwards of 7 to 8 hours, where as Ubuntu freshly installed only generates 4.5 hours. The screen saver will crash the system if not set to black screen and the gnome login window will not remember it's greeting message after a restart.

FUTURE PLANS

Eventually, I would like to encrypt the 50GB FAT32 partition so that prying eyes cannot easily access it when I'm away from my desk (it does contain some valuable information), generate some better battery life in Ubuntu via CPU frequency scaling, and make some automated backup script just in case things go haywire.