I recently bought a Dell Inspiron 530 with Ubuntu and made it dual boot Ubuntu/f7. There were a few quirks along the way, so I thought I'd shard them with this list. In the future, is there a better place to post this kind of info (eg, one where I can upload screenshots, etc)? It would be awesome if I could attach this kind of stuff to my smolt profile. Anyway, for now, here are some of my notes... First, I wanted to keep the factory Ubuntu installed, so I wanted to repartition the disk to make room for f7. In fact I made room for f8 as well. I bought the lowest end version I could get which came with a ~150G Ubuntu partition. I first tried to use the gparted live CD to repartition it, but it seemed to hang at some point. So I tried the f7 live CD that has gparted and that worked. I repartitioned the drive so it now looks like the following (originally sda6 was bigger and sda[78] didn't exist).: Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160000000000 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19452 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 6 48163+ de Dell Utility /dev/sda2 7 268 2104515 b W95 FAT32 /dev/sda3 * 269 293 200812+ 83 Linux /dev/sda4 294 19452 153894667+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sda5 294 455 1301233+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda6 456 6704 50195061 83 Linux /dev/sda7 6705 13078 51199123+ 83 Linux /dev/sda8 13079 19452 51199123+ 83 Linux Next, I downloaded the f7 DVD iso into a file on my Ubuntu partition and downloaded and burnt an f7 rescue disk (I didn't have any blank DVDs to burn, so I figured I'd do a hard drive install). I booted to the rescue disk and changed the boot options to have "askmethod" so I could do a hard drive install. The system paused for several minutes with a message having something to do with ata_piix then continued. But when I tried to select a hard drive install, it gave me some error about no device. So I tried an http install and it gave me the same error. It couldn't find my hard drive or my network card apparently. :( So I googled for a while and found to try adding irqpoll to the boot line. This worked for me and I was able to continue with my hard drive install. I did a custom installation of f7 onto /dev/sda7 to preserve Ubuntu and didn't install grub. After the install was completed, I modified the /grub/menu.lst on sda3 from Ubuntu to add f7 as a grub option. It would have been easier to just install grub from the f7 install, but I wanted to leave everything as close to factory as possible. So I added something like this to the end of menu.lst: title f7 (2.6.21-1.3194.fc7) root (hd0,6) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7.img This worked and I was able to boot into f7. The next problem was that the ethernet card was not detected!! Some more googling found a fedora forum page that pointed to directions to download a driver from Intel: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/printthread.php?t=162008 This worked and my new Dell is now dual boot Ubunto/f7. _________________________________________________________________ News, entertainment and everything you care about at Live.com. Get it now! http://www.live.com/getstarted.aspx
