Dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu: take 2
Ok, so my hard drive crashed. And I talking major no-survivors airplane crash. Thank god for backups. Too bad I was still setting up some things and not everything was properly backed up, but nothing imported was lost. I got my computer back 26h after turning it in. With a new hard drive and a freshly rolled out Windows 7. So once again time to set up everything. I was so glad I wrote about this last time I did it. Unfortunately I didn’t write down everything. So let’s do it better this time.
First of all, last time I installed Ubuntu 10.04. In the mean time 10.10 was released and so I went for this one. The installer is still as easy as pie. And what’s even better: Ubuntu even proposed to install the proprietary drivers for my wireless card. Hurray! This was one of the problems I needed to fix last time and which I forgot to write down.
Another problem was that Ubuntu doesn’t automatically mount the NTFS partition I set up to share my data between Windows and Ubuntu. There exists a utility that takes care of this, so you don’t need to go mocking around in /etc/fstab. This application is called ntfs-config. Once you’ve installed this package, you can find it in System > Administration. I was glad I remembered the name, since it has been a couple of months after all, but when I tried to start it, it didn’t work. Some googling returned several people having the same problem with Ubuntu 10.10. When you run ntfs-config from the command line (with sudo of course), you get the following error message:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/ntfs-config", line 102, in
main(args, opts)
File "/usr/bin/ntfs-config", line 75, in main
app = NtfsConfig()
File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/NtfsConfig/NtfsConfig.py", line 56, in __init__
os.mkdir(HAL_CONFIG_DIR)
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/hal/fdi/policy'
The cleanest solution I found to solve this problem was to install HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer). Just install the package called hal.
Another thing I find useful is the ability to open a folder in the terminal directly from Nautilus. This can be achieved by installing the package nautilus-open-terminal. And one more Nautilus extension I recently came to love is nautilus-gksu which allows you to open a file as root.
OK, I think this about covers everything I missed last time. Or at least for now. I’ll try to update this better when I still change something. That’s a promise to my future-me.
