sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Raphael Gradenwitz <raphael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Anthony,

On Fr, 2009-10-02 at 12:51 -0700, ajmctaggart wrote:
> I've seen few and far posts, mostly highlighting what didn't work so
> well after Karmic was installed.  I would really like to know,
> overall, how is it going?  Are you all happy with the upgrade from
> Jaunty to Karmic?  I am a bit apprehensive myself to dive right in, so
> any insight you have would be very helpful.  Right now my Vaio is my
> work/school machine, and the weekend would be the only downtime I
> could afford.

I have installed one partition with Windows Vista, one with Ubuntu
Karmic and one with Ubuntu Jaunty. That way one will never have real
downtime.

Here how I partitioned my 200 GB harddisk:

~$ sudo fdisk /dev/sda -l

Disk /dev/sda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x5c2fc21c

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1         891     7151616   27  Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2   *         891       13969   105049450+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3           13970       14394     3413812+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4           14395       24321    79738627+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           14395       18650    34186288+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6           18651       23270    37110118+  83  Linux
/dev/sda7           23271       24321     8442126   82  Linux swap /
Solaris

sda1 is the recovery partition for windows, sda2 is the pre installed
Windows Vista.

sda3 is formated as ext2 and is /boot from karmic
sda5 is formated as ext4 and is / from karmic
sda6 is formated as ext4 and is / from jaunty
sda7 is swap for karmic or jaunty.

The Bootloader boots on /dev/sda3 and the /boot/grub/menu.lst is manualy
changed so that it has the entries for jaunty and windows as well..

Sounds a bit complicated maybe but if you are familiar with multi-boot
installations its not difficult.

When Karmic is booted, the partitions are mounted on:

sda3 on /boot
sda5 on /
sda6 on /ubuntu/jaunty
sda2 on /windows/recovery
sda3 on /windows/vista

When Jaunty is booted, the partitions are mounted on:

sda6 on /
sda3 on /ubuntu/karmic/boot
sda5 on /ubuntu/karmic/root
sda2 on /windows/recovery
sda3 on /windows/vista

The /boot dir from jaunty is not on an own partition (like in karmic).

Then I have taken care, that the uid's are exactly the same on both
installations thus I can use the home dir from Jaunty on Karmic and vice
versa.

From both Ubuntu installations I can read-write on the windows ntfs
partitions.

After a kernel-update in the Jaunty installation, I only have to add the
new entry in the /boot/grub/menu.lst from karmic (because that one is
the active boot-partition in my case) From my Jaunty installation that
file is located here:
/ubuntu/karmic/boot/grub/menu.lst

If you don't want to go that way, feel free to simply upgrade to karmic,
everything works great and you can get help from this list and the
community is not limited to this list.

Maybe it is not a bad idea to have a live DVD (or CD) that runs on your
machine to enable access to some important files only for the case that
the upgrade fails, does not boot or so but I do not expect that you'll
get trouble.

In fact, because everything works great, I mostly use Karmic and only
very few Jaunty and Windows is practicaly not in use..

My advice:
give karmic a try.

Raphael

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