Receiving my New ASUS X5DC laptop & Installing Ubuntu 9.10

At 15:45 on 25 Jan, I placed an order at http://www.mobiles.co.uk for a new contract mobile phone for £30 per month, the deal was for Nokia 6303 phone on orange network and came with 1200 any-time minutes + 500MB Internet, not only that, it came with a FREE ASUS 15.6” HD Laptop!!!

By 1pm on the 26 Jan - I had received the phone & new laptop. Yes....of course I unwrapped the mobile and stuck it on charge but my interest wasn't on the phone, it was on the ASUS Laptop :)


I unwrapped the laptop, installed the battery, switched it on and booted Windows. The laptop came pre-installed with Windows 7 64-Bit Home Premium, after a little play I decided to install Ubuntu 9.10 – leaving Windows 7 in place, so I could flip between them until I decided if I wanted to migrate back to Windows after running Ubuntu for the couple of years on my old laptop...

I didn't want to mess with the partitions, so I opted to install Ubuntu using Wubi.

Wubi allows you to install ubuntu onto existing Windows partitions.

I downloaded that latest 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10 iso and burnt it to CD.

Rebooted Windows 7, logged in and started the Ubuntu Installation by inserting the disk and following the on-screen instructions. The Wubi installation completed and the laptop rebooted.

The laptop booted into the Ubuntu installation and everything was going great, at the end of the installation Ubuntu rebooted and that's when my problems began....

I selected ubuntu from the boot menu and was presented with rescue: grub> prompt. I rebooted Windows 7 and connected to the internet and immediately visited http://ubuntuforums.org. After searching the forum threads for a couple of minutes, I came across other users experiencing the same problems – but it wasn't long before I found a post that explained what the problem was....

It appears that there is a bug in Grub 2 that prevents files on an NTFS partition being read if the aren't on the first 4GBs of the disk and the solution is to download wubildr and save it “C:\” replacing the existing one. For anyone experiencing the same problem, you can download a new copy of Wubildr here

After installing wubildr. I was able to boot ubuntu for the first-time and proceeded to load X-Windows, the first thing that stuck me was how bad the screen looked. My next post will explain why....