sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Gerald Nunn <gnunn@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Interesting question, I don't have a Z yet but am strongly considering one
and as part of my due diligence I'm looking at how easy it would be to get
Ubuntu 12.10 on the machine. Thus I would be very interested in what is the
best way to install Ubuntu 12.10 on the Z, both for when you want to dual
boot and when you want an Ubuntu only on the system. From my own reading,
the tricky part of the install seems to be dealing with two SSD drives in
fakeraid or configuring software RAID 0. Since Canonical doesn't put out
the alternate media any more which had the capability of dealing with
fakeraid or setting up RAID 0 it seems like the available options to try
would be:

a. Install from WUBI but I would suspect that it would fubar things when it
tries to setup GRUB on the fakeraid
b. Install 12.04 using the alternate media which can deal with fakeraid or
create software based RAID 0 and then upgrade to 12.10 once installation is
complete, could work but I usually prefer clean installs versus upgrades
c. In cases where it is Ubuntu only, disable fakeraid and simply treat the
two SSD drives as separate disks, downside is that it probably doesn't
result in an efficient use of space.
d. In cases of dual boot, disable fakeraid and re-install Windows followed
by an Ubuntu install

For me I would probably get the 256 GB version of the machine and dual
boot. If doing an install from scratch I would be tempted to try option D
with the raid disabled and set things up as follows:

a. UEFI boot, Windows and Linux "/" partitions on disk1
b. Linux "/home" partition completely covering disk2

I'm no partition expert but hopefully having the three partitions on disk1
would be workable and cause no issues as I think UEFI supports up to four
partitions per disk. I like the layout above because it avoids all the
issues with the fakeraid while making reasonable use of the available
space. I would probably allocate 30GB to the Linux root which is very
generous, 150 MB to the UEFI boot partition and then 90 GB or so to Windows
which is plenty for a handful of games which is all I use Windows for. The
"/home" partition with it's 128 GB of space would be plenty for me and it
maintains the IMHO linux best practice of keeping your home directories in
a different partition then the Linux root directories.

The downside of this approach would be you would have to do a fresh install
of Windows and I don't think you could use the recovery media because I
suspect the recovery media creates the factory partitions but I could be
wrong about this. I'm not sure how easy a fresh install would be in terms
of getting all of the Vaio drivers and software would be working.

I would be very interested in hearing what process others took to get
Ubuntu 12.10 working on this machine.




On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 10:53 AM, Miguel Veliz <miguelv06@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Any one tried installing Ubuntu using wubi??
>
>
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