Ubuntu is good to start with. Very user-friendly. Runs on the GNOME desktop environment and comes with quite a few applications to get you started.
Kubuntu is the same distro with the KDE desktop environment and alternative KDE applications (Dolphin, Konquerer, Amarok, Kontact.)
As far as installation, as long as you have Vista installed first, you'll have the least amount of trouble. During installation, Ubuntu installs the GRUB bootloader which already has entries for Windows Vista (actually, GRUB will redirect to the Vista bootloader if Vista is selected in the boot menu.) You don't have to worry about configuring boot entries at all (unless you want to change the boot list order, which is pretty easy to do with a text editor.)
The hardest thing about the installation is partition management. If you're keeping Windows Vista as your primary operating system, you probably don't want to let Ubuntu automatically repartition free NTFS space to EX3 as it pleases. Your best bet would be to manually partition off 8-10GB or so for the root partition (mounted as "/") and 2GB or so for the swap partition (virtual memory; functions the same way the Windows page file does.)
Once Ubuntu is installed and boots up, it'll actually mount your NTFS partitions for you, allowing you full read/write access to all of your "Windows" (NTFS) partitions.
Just do a quick Google for partitioning guidelines. It's nothing difficult..but you can lose data in partitioning if you don't know what you're doing.. for example: re-formatting your entire "C:" drive as EX3 is obviously a BAD idea ;). Make sure you're ALWAYS working with free space (by 'shrinking' one of your current partitions.)
Log in to comment