I installed Ubuntu 8.04 in my Quad core desktop 2 days back. The installation was smooth. The only issue I had was with partitioning. I usually create separate partitions in my hard drive for boot, root, home and swap directories before installation, but I didn’t do that this time. I first thought of using the Guided Partition in Ubuntu installer, but I wasn’t sure how it would partition. I never used that before, so I fired up GParted from the live CD and created partitions for the ext3 file system and installed Ubuntu.
My Gateway system has a hidden partition for system recovery. I was wondering whether to remove that before installing Ubuntu or not. I didn’t touch it when I installed Ubuntu, so when Ubuntu created the GRUB menu, it created 2 entries for Vista (with same names). The 1st one will take you to the restore partition and the 2nd one to the regular Vista. I didn’t know it until I tried both.
When I started System Monitor, it showed all 4 cores of my system and their usages. I then started restoring my files from the backup. I copied my pictures directory from the backup to the pictures folder in the Windows partition (NTFS). The directory was 18.6 GB and the copying operation took 30 minutes to complete. When Ubuntu was copying the files, all 4 cores were running at 100%, as you can see from the picture below. I’m fine with that, but the problem came when I started using Firefox during that operation. Since almost all CPUs were being used for the copy operation, my Firefox response was quite sluggish. I had to wait few seconds to minutes when I switched tabs or scrolled down the page. I’m not sure whose fault was that.
Once the copying was done, the system was back to normal. I then tried to reboot the system, but Ubuntu didn’t reboot. I had to force it to reboot. If you generally press CTRL + ALT+ Delete, Ubuntu would reboot, but with Hardy, pressing those keys brings the option menu (options to reboot, shutdown etc.) again. When it rebooted, it didn’t mount the Windows partition (157.3 GB media in the picture), to which I copied the files. I got an error saying the shutdown was not proper, so I have to use the force option to mount it again. Further reboots didn’t help. I then added the force option to /etc/fstab file. I have to go home and start the system to see if it mounts.
The other issue I had was with the Tracker search tool that comes as default in Ubuntu. I checked the Generate Thumbnail option in the Tracker preferences and whenever I searched, I saw only the number of search results on the left pane. I didn’t see anything in the result page. Once I unchecked that option, Tracker worked fine.
When I log into Vista, the default login with Vista‘s sidebar & all startup programs including Norton 360 take 1G of my 3G RAM. When I log into Ubuntu, the total memory usage was only less than 5%. As you can see in the picture, with the big file copying operation plus Firefox occupied only 13.7% of the memory, still less than half of what Vista uses by default.
