Advice on installing latest Ubuntu on my new G73jh-a3?

I've been running Linux Mint as a dual boot on my little Asus N10J and I've been very happy with it. I'd love to devote part of my new gaming laptop to Ubuntu but I'm leary about all the hard-drives in this beast. Any install advice would be greatly appreciated. Oh, it just arrived at my house in Missouri today but unfortunately I'm 6,000 miles away

 

What are you leery about?

 

If you're really that worried about wiping something out, remove the primary hard drive before dual booting.

Also the n10j gets horrid battery life out of linux, unless you install the appropriate management software. And if you're able to do that, then why worry about installing new software?

 

I should have been more specific. My worries are with installing Ubuntu or Linux Mint on a laptop with mulitple hard-drives. I'll seek advice on that elsewhere. As for battery life on the little N10, I'm getting about 3 hours, 20 minutes on average (Linux Mint/Windows XP dual boot). I just thought that maybe someone here had been down the road of installing a Linux distro (dual boot) on an Asus laptop that had multiple hard-drives. Cheers,

 

Yeah, it's the same in grub once you've got linux on hda0 and windows on hda1, as it would be simply specifying two different partitions.

I still don't understand what you're asking...

 

I don't know why a laptop with 2 drives would be any different from a desktop with two drives.

If Windows is already installed on the laptop/desktop on the primary drive, then there is really no problem installing Linux where ever. The big problem is installing Windows AFTER a Linux install.

After Ubuntu is installed, it will automatically adjust the MBR with grub 2 (the new default for Ubuntu, not legacy grub) Now the machine will boot by giving you a choice of what operating system to start up.

I have Ubuntu 10.4 on a netbook (single boot) and on my desktop (dual boot) My procedure is that after Ubuntu is finished installing, I go into Windows recovery console, and fix the MBR so it only boots windows. Then I use the Super-Grub boot floppy disk to start up Linux whenever I want to use it. If I were going to do this on the G73, I would boot with the USB flash drive version. This is a sort of "stealth" Linux. It's not visible to Windows, or to the casual user, and yet it is there and available.

The great thing about the Super-Grub boot option, is that whenever Ubuntu updates the kernel itself, Super-Grub will still boot normally, so there's no need to fix the menulist file (which doesn't exist anymore in grub 2 anyway.) When Super-Grub boots, it will present you with a list of operating systems it found, that can be booted. Very cool!

 

I recently bought the UL30VT-A1. I'm a big Linux fan so one of the first things I did was slap Ubuntu onto this puppy. My experience has gone like this:
- Dual boot works fine (as expected). GRUB hardy misses
- Camera was upside down. There are a few fixes for this out there
- No video switching. I'm running NVIDIA 100% of the time
- To get the wireless card to work with my WPA2 encryption I had to install wicd. The default network manager choked.
- I run KDE .. must people prefer GNOME (I guess)
- Something is up with adjusting the lcd brightness via the keyboard buttons ... I gave up on that and ended up using the KDE battery manager to adjust brightness

Everything else is working fine. I haven't timed the battery life but I don't think I'm getting anything close to 12 hours. The Windows 7 install hasn't seen much action, so I can't compare battery lives between the two.

 

There's a thread for Linux on the N10 here.

There's a thread for Linux on the G73 here.

There's a thread for switchable graphics here.