Manually Install Ubuntu

Resize your disks and dual-boot Windows with Ubuntu

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, which is 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 box, which 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 megabytes in the space provided, and click “Shrink” to start the process.

3 Updates and Plugins After your computer boots from the Ubuntu installation medium, it displays a checklist. Make sure you toggle the two available checkboxes on this screen. The first checkbox option fetches any available updates from the Internet, and the other installs the plugin required to play MP3 content.

4 Use Free Space In the screen labeled “Installation type,” toggle the “Something else” radio button to manually partition the disk. Ubuntu now shows you a list of partitions on the hard drive. Select the one labeled “Free space,” and click the plus sign (“+”) to create a partition out of the space you freed up in Windows.

5 Define Partitions In the Create Partition box, enter the size for the Ubuntu partition, leaving 1,024MB free for the swap partition. Then use the Mount Point pull-down menu to select the “/” option. Similarly, create a partition for swap, but instead of the default “ext4” option, select the “Swap area” option.

6 Login Credentials And that’s it. The installer now starts the process of installing Ubuntu. While the files are being copied to the hard drive in the background, it asks you for your location and time zone, as well as your keyboard layout. In the last screen, you’re asked to enter your desired login and password details.