Dual booting Vista and Ubuntu

The last couple of weeks have been interesting. I got a new laptop, a dell inspiton 1720 to be precise. I got it pre-installed with Vista home premium edition. But I wanted to have a linux distro to play around with. Ubuntu was the obvious choice for its ease.

Before i got around doing that I had to overclocked my video card in vista to get it to play Oblivion smoothly. The laptop has a 8400m GS but when i started played Oblivion i got a measly 30-35fps. I had a 156.xx driver but somehow 169.04 would never install cribbing that that it could detect any suitable driver to update. However the 169.09 from laptopvideo2go installed properly after uninstalling all available videocard drivers. After I installed rivatuner and overclocked from 400Mhz to 500Mhz the fps on Oblivion increased to a nice 45-50 fps. Plus my 3DMark06 scores increased from 1276 to around 1450+.

Then it was bigger things on hand, so I downloaded ubuntu, waited for a nice saturday morning to install and configure ubuntu. List of steps followed

1) Created a new partition of 30Gb using windows partition manager.
2) Burnt the live cd iso image onto a cd
3) Booted up the laptop using the live cd and press install. Some site say inspiron series should use the alternate cd but live cd just worked fine for me. (At this point i got stuck since it would not return from trying to find the partions. So had to got Places>Computer>OS and then rety the install to get it going past this option.
4) Reboot once install was done and i find my wireless wont work.

Logged into windows and found some nice instructions on setting them up. Got that sorted out and I was all set finally !!

To finish things I installed all the required software using the synaptic package. As a nice touch i was even able to build ruby1.9 from the source.

Some must visit links when you are planning to dual boot ubuntu with vista on a dell inspiron 1720

1) General instructions - http://apcmag.com/5046/how_to_dual_boot_vista_with_linux_vista_installed_first
2) Setting up the broadcom wireless card - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=297092 (I should add other instructions were not this clear and did not work properly)
3) To get soundcard installed you have to install the package - 'linux-backports-modules-generic'
4) To install ruby 1.9 and keep 1.8 follow instructions at http://ruby.tie-rack.org/28/installing-19/

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