<< Back to Part 1: Planning

Installing Ubuntu is not too hard: download the ISO image file, burn it to a CD, and then boot the CD.  I used the Live CD of the Desktop edition.  On the first screen I chose the Install Ubuntu option (click for full size on this screen snapshot - or any other in this entry):

The installer prompts for the usual things: keyboard type, language, time zone, etc.  The part of the process where things can go horribly wrong is in the partitioning step.  I chose the Manual option:

The partitions were displayed - ignore the sizes, I got this screen snapshot from a test environment, not from my actual system.  The important thing is to note that /dev/sda3 is listed as "swap":

It is my contention that the exact intent of the installer's partitioner is a bit unclear here, so to be on the safe side, I needed to select the entry for /dev/sda3 and then click the Edit partition button:

In the Edit Partition dialog that pops up, I set the "Use as" field to do not use the partition:

And then I clicked OK to go back to the main partitioner dialog:

Note something interesting here: even though I told the partitioner to not use /dev/sda3, it still changes the type displayed to "Linux-swap": 

Whatever - I don't care what type it thinks /dev/sda3 is, as long as it does not use it. After selecting and editing the partitions that I did want to use for Ubuntu, the final display looked like this:

So while overall the Ubuntu install went smoothly, I was a bit disappointed in its partitioner.  In addition to the usability issues already mentioned, during one trial run I ran into a serious bug - hopefully it will be fixed in a future release. 

After the partitioning was specified, the rest of the process took only a few minutes to finish the install. I was then able to reboot the system, using the GRUB menu displayed by the fresh install of Ubuntu.  I verified that /etc/fstab does not contain an entry for /dev/sda3: 

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
# /dev/sda7
UUID=1ed7fa17-6d77-4b49-be1a-22481310fd1b /               reiserfs relatime        0       1
# /dev/sda5
UUID=a9422872-b814-4d11-8218-b559642b78d7 /boot           reiserfs notail,relatime 0       2
# /dev/sda2
UUID=C07E0D1F7E0D0FB8 /ntfs           ntfs    defaults,umask=007,gid=46 0       1
# /dev/sda6
UUID=2dedd179-06f0-4139-89aa-1d7e5c3ec0d4 none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0

The final step was to copy the /boot/grub/menu.lst file to a USB drive so that I would be able to copy/paste some of its entries into the menu.lst file that OpenSolaris's GRUB will eventually use.  Having done that, it is time for Part 3: Installing OpenSolaris.