DELL XPS M1330 upgrade to dual boot Ubuntu 8.10

Ok, we’ve done it before with a Thinkpad and it worked out pretty well. So, why not do it again, especially on this really neat little laptop with plenty of disk space and the previous issues with Vista booting up into a loop of blue screens due to driver issues for the hard disk.

Installation of Ubuntu

And the process itself is really easy as Ubuntu 8.10 does it all by itself.

1. Insert disk and boot up into Live distribution
2. Doubleclick the INSTALL shortcut  and follow the instructions.

In that process Ubuntu even asks you to import your Vista settings (documents and some applicable settings), reorganizes your partitions to free space for its own required partitions (though I did not like that a hundred percent). After the first start you follow some of the guides and install restricted hardware drivers, codecs and of course the software you need. And that was it. It did works just fine. MediaDirect works fine and under Ubuntu the Media direct button starts my Music program (Rythmbox by default).

Share Thunderbird Mail and Profile between Ubuntu and Vista

And to save some space I of course did not import all my files, but link to them from the regarding folders. To make it even more efficent I share my Thunderbird profile between these two OS. I love Evolution, but Thunderbird caught up a lot especially with improved Lightning (the calendar plugin).

All you really need is the Mozilla wiki page on Thunderbird profiles. Here are the steps to execute to share the profiles:

1. Locate the position of your profile in Vista:
%AppData%\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
resolves for me to
C:\Users\dell\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\cyprt14e.default
2. The profile in Ubuntu is located in ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.default/
3. Go to the folder ~/.thunderbird and edit the profile.ini
4. Replace the path to the local Thunderbird profile with the Vista one located on the mounted C-Drive
   Path=/media/disk/Users/dell/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles/cyprt14e.default
5. Last but not least, set the isRelative to false by placing a 0 instead of the 1

My profile.ini does now look like that:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=0
Path=/media/disk/Users/dell/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles/cyprt14e.default

And that is it. Start Thunderbird and all your account and plugin settings should work just fine and out of the box.

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