Dual booting Ubuntu 9 on HP Pavilion laptop

After much deliberation I decided to take the plunge and install Ubuntu on my laptop today. It's a basic HP Pavilion sporting an AMD Turino64 processor and an nVidia 7150m graphics card.

Then I got cold feet and decided I did not want to repartition my hard disk and run the risk of trashing my existing Vista install, too much work there. I opted to use Wubi, a Ubuntu installer that uses space on an existing Windows partition and adds a dual-boot menu.

http://wubi-installer.org/

Fantastic, worked like a charm. The home page says go make a coffee while it installs, they need to upgrade their coffee maker because I drank a couple of cups while I waited. None the less, the end result was just what I was looking for and I have no complaints. Even got Wifi and Bluetooth out of the box.

Anyone else going down this route with a mobile nVidia gfx card may find themselves stuck with an 800x600 display. In that case go read the post here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...u-9.04-721637/

in particular, reply #7 solved my problems.

Okay, moving on now; java, eclipse, tomcat .... it's like a new toy with the added bonus of letting me run remote X apps from my server as well For the time being I will be using this blog to record problems/successes I have setting this laptop up.