The Life and Times.. of a Worthless Mind..

I was never good about writing here and go many months at a time without even remembering that LiveJournal even exists. I do all personal blogging, photo posting and basically everything else at posterous.com now. http://andrewb.posterous.com 

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I have deleted or made private nearly every LJ post as I would prefer just not have one. LJ is currently the main openID that I use so I have to keep it going. 

So DebianToday.com took off real nice the first month or so but then I ran in to some money issues and the hosting got shut down. Right when I was about to give up on all of it I found a post on stumbleupon about the top free web hosts. Now I had used tripod, angelfire, and other free webhosts like 8-10 years ago and didn't want any pop ups. Then I found 000webhost which is pretty freakin awesome. It's not the best hosting in the world I'll point that out right now, I have had a few issues here and there but nothing that wasn't fixed and nothing that would stop me from using it. You get the follow stuff...

FREE Hosting

- 1500 MB of Disk Space (Now get 350mb instead of 250mb!)
- 100 GB Bandwidth
- Your own domain hosting
- cPanel Control panel
- Website Builder
- Over 500 website templates ready for download
- Free POP3 Email Box and Webmail access
- FTP and Web based File Manager
- PHP, MySQL, Perl, CGI, Ruby.
- No Ads at all!

I'll be honest with you and let you know that if you sign up I make some money. That is just an other perk of signing up. Once you get signed up for every person you refer they give you $5. All you have to get is get people to sign up for an already great service that is totally free. It's kind of hard to believe I know so check it out now. 

No matter how hard I try I can never remember to post to LJ. I will post a few days then totally forget it exists for months. Right now I'm just way to busy to be posting stuff here. I started a blog about Debian GNU/Linux about a month ago and it's getting slammed with visitors so I'm putting a lot of work in to keeping a regular flow of original articles posted. It can be really hard to write original stuff that is worth a damn on a daily basis but I have seen the drops in visitors if I miss posting for a few days and it isn't pretty.

So if you're in to Debian or Linux at all or just curious check out www.DebianToday.com

Shrink NTFS and install Ubuntu

This quick guide is meant for those who are currently using Windows on their entire drive and need to shrink the partition in order to install Ubuntu. These instructions are meant to be used wit Ubuntu 7.04 or higher (8.04 is latest release at the time of writing). The first step will be to get your Ubuntu disc from www.ubuntu.com. You can either download the iso or order a CD be sent to you in the mail. Please make sure when getting the CD that you get it for the correct architecture for instance i386. Once you have the Live CD in your hands and have checked to make sure that it works, then it's time to start the shrinking process. First open up windows and make sure to shut down every application you possibly can. Once you are clean and free of programs running rogue it's time to run a check disk. Once the disk has been checked (this may require reboot) it's time to defrag the hard disk. Once again, please make sure that every non essential app is off, this includes virus scanners, messengers, office, I mean everything that isn't required for the computer to have windows running. The de-fragmentation can take quite a while depending on the size of your disk and the amount of fragmented data so this may be a good time to go grab some coffee or a snack or something. Now that you have defragmented the drive it's time to do it again, yes that is correct we're going to do it again. The reason for this is to make sure all the data is at the start of the hard disk so that when you do split it in to partitions nothing gets chopped up. Unfortunately the first defrag doesn't always do the trick. I personally run it 10 times in a row but that is probably overkill. Please note that once you have run the process one time that the coinciding instances should happen very quickly. Shrinking NTFS Partition In our next step we will be booting to Ubuntu via the Live CD. Once you have booted up it's time to run GParted as root. In your terminal window type the following:
 

ubuntu@user:~$ gksu gparted

gksu opens an application in it's GUI form as an other user, in this case root and GParted is the Gnome Partition tool.

Once you have GParted open highlight your current NTFS drive and click the resize button.

This example is from a bit of extra space I have on a current drive but shows you how simple it is to resize the drive. Make sure that you give yourself ample room to keep all of your files, plus what else you will be adding on your NTFS partition and also leave room for Linux swap (roughly 90% of your RAM size).

Once you have finished this process and you have an unwritten area of your partition it's time to install Ubuntu. On the desktop of the Live CD there is an icon that says install. I would click that. The Ubuntu installation process is very simple and walks you through. Now in my experience the GUI tends to hang up at certain parts so I must stress that you be very patient with the installation GUI. During the installation you will be asked if you want Ubuntu to handle the partitions or if you would like to do it manually, definitely do it manually. Once you get to the screen with partitions you should see an NTFS Partitioned an area of free space. Now it's time to determine how much swap you need. I personally think you should use about 90% of what your RAM is so if you have 1GB of RAM I would suggest about 950mb of swap. I've had problems with ubuntu going to swap way to fast if my swap is equal or higher than my ram. So using the 950mb example lets make an EXT3 partition in root ( / ) for ubuntu to go on. Leave 951mb of space following for your swap. Once this EXT3 partition is made lets select the remaining 950mb and make this Linux Swap. After doing that it's time to apply your changes and move on to the next step of installation. Everything from this point should be pretty easy to figure out and most of it will just be a matter of clicking next or yes.

I hope you have a good time with your new installation of Ubuntu Linux and make sure to use google before you ask any questions, in almost every case someone has asked the question and had it answered so it's easier to just google. If you still can't find an answer then check ubuntuforums.org or ask a friend.

If this article is well taken I will add on an article that will explain how to get your Ubuntu desktop/laptop in prime shape with all the best tools and apps.  Being a Debian geek and only having used ubuntu in small doses I may start doing some guides for getting started with Debian, but once again, only if there is interest. If you want to see any of these articles written please contact me at bizurke@gmail.com