Boon (the desktop) is running Fedora 9, which is out of date. Ubuntu has been running nicely on the Thinkpad for some time, so I´d like to upgrade to that.
The first step is to take a look at the disk space for a place to put it. Luckily, I´ve got an old unused /boot partition, so I can use that. I’ve learned from past mistakes that sharing a boot partition between different distributions is a mistake. Thinking they’re upgrading, they tend to uninstall older kernels still being used.
I have Logical Volume Management installed to take advantage of flexible partitioning and drive striping. There’s enough space on the LVM for the new install, so that’s no problem.
I grabbed the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop ISO from Ubuntu.com and burned the CD. After booting the install disk, the installation can’t see the LVM. A quick check on-line turns up the problem. In order to use LVM, you need either the Alternate or Server install disks, which don’t have an install GUI. I burned the Alternate disk and started the install. I chose Ext4 journaling file systems for /, /boot, and /home and put Grub on the /boot partition /dev/sda3. Unfortunately, this isn’t the boot device for the drive, so I can’t run anything other than my old installations. I boot into the old Fedora installation and see where Grub was installed and update it. I hit another snag. Fedora 9 can’t read Ext4. Plan B is to boot the Ubuntu disc and run the rescue feature. This gives you a root prompt. I chose the new installation’s root as the root of my rescue session and manually mounted /boot. I ran grub-install /dev/sda (the current location of the boot loader) and rebooted.
Now I’ve got a running Ubuntu system and can boot the old Fedora 9 installation, too. The first log in takes a half minute to bring up my desktop. This is the same problem I had on the Thinkpad, so I know it’ll be fixed when the updates are applied. Soon the Update Manager pops up and does its thing. Problem solved.
Things I needed to install that didn’t come out of the box:
gkrellm for system monitor
emacs for text editing
startupmanager to edit Grub 2 configuration
gnucash for budgeting and banking
flashplugin-installer for Shockwave Flash plugin for Firefox
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