INSTALL UBUNTU WITH WINDOWS

1 Make room

To create an empty partition for your Ubuntu installation, you’ll first have to squeeze your existing Windows partition. Fire up the Disk Management tool in Windows, and right-click your main partition that’s typically assigned the drive letter C. Then select the Shrink Volume option from the pop-up menu.

2 Shrink Windows

This brings up the Shrink dialog that shows you the total size of the hard drive and the maximum amount of space that you can squeeze out of the selected partition. To create a new partition, specify the size of the partition in the space provided in megabytes and click Shrink to start the process.

3 Updates and plugins

After your computer boots from the Ubuntu installation medium, it’ll display a checklist. Toggle the two available checkboxes on this screen. The first checkbox option will fetch any available updates from the Internet, and the other will install the plugin required to play MP3 content and Wi-fi firmware.

4 Use free space

In the screen labelled Installation type, toggle the ‘Something else’ radio button to manually partition the disk. Ubuntu will now show you a list of partitions on the hard drive. Select the one labelled Free Space and click the plus sign (+) to create a partition out of this space you freed up in Windows.

5 Define partitions

In the Create partition box enter the size for the Ubuntu partition. Then use the ‘Mount point’ pull-down menu to select the / option. If you like, you can create a separate home partition (if you want to keep user files and system files separate) in exactly the same way. Just select /home from the menu.

6 Localise and personalise

And that’s it. The installer will now start the process of installing Ubuntu. While the files are being copied to the hard drive in the background, it’ll ask about your locale. In the last screen you’ll be asked to enter your desired login and password details, as well as a name for your computer.