First time installing ubuntu

I decided to install ubuntu on a my lenovo t410 that already has Win7 and 8. Easy peasy, right?

Installing

Well, first clean up and defrag the windows partition so I can shrink it. ~30gb allocated now.

I then downloaded 12.10 from unbuntu.com and put it on my thumb drive and booted off that. The installation steps were pretty straight forward. I selected the newly created partition (thankfully keyed of the partition size since I couldn’t easily map the /dev/sda1 that ubuntu was showing me to windows drive letters).

When prompted for a mount point stack exchange to the rescue. “/” root.

Once it was installed it hijacked the windows boot loader w/ grub. Reverting that was pretty easy - again stack exchange to the recue with “boot-repair” for ubuntu.

Now on the windows side, just needed to install EasyBCD to configure the windows boot loader to recognize the ubuntu partition. This is great, I now have my windows boot loader… but when I select ubuntu, I get the grub menu with its own list and 10s countdown :/   This walkthrough helped me edit grub to just go right into ubuntu.

Now What

All in all it was very straight forward. It helped a lot to have my mac nearby to google as problems arose. Now that it is installed, I need to run through the “important things to tweak” list and I should be golden. Then, webstorm, LAMP and we’ll see from there.