Going all in on Linux

The Motivation

For the first part of my learning journey I will be reading the book "How Linux Works" by Brian Ward. I want to follow along every step of the way as I go through the chapters so I figured I can spin up a virtual machine in my Linux Academy playground and play around with that. But then I said...let's go deeper and actually install a Linux distribution on my machine.

Which Linux Distro?

After doing some research, I decided on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. The GNOME interface looks really nice and beginner-friendly and it's reassuring to have 5 years of support and stability for the long-term support versions.

Considerations for Installation 

After deciding on the distro I want it's time to think about how much space I want to allocate for it. Ultimately, I decided on the following partitions:

1. Root: 25 GB - I decided on this amount for the root to be a little on the safe side since I will probably only need ~15-20 GB. 
2. Boot: 512 MB - This is pretty standard for a boot partition
3. Home: 95 GB - I opted for a separate home directory to separate my settings from the rest of the system. This will give me an advantage if I ever want to switch distributions. I wanted this to have a lot of space so I can tinker. 
4. Swap: 0 - I think it's important to say that I did not think it was necessary to include a swap partition as my laptop has 16GB RAM.

Making Some Space

My laptop currently has a 256 GB SSD + 1TB HDD. I want to be able to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu on the SSD, however I only have about 20 GB of free space on it so it looks like it's finally time to clear out the random junk I have! First, I took a disk image using Acronis True Image and transferred that data to my HDD (which was empty). Then I made sure that I could boot Windows using my HDD in case I corrupted my SSD during the Ubuntu installation and disk partitioning. After deleting all of my data files and uninstalling Madden 19, I was able to clear out the required 120 GB that I needed (somehow I had about 40 GB of data sitting in my downloads folder that I didn't know about...yikes).



Creating the Disk Partitions and Bootable USB with Ubuntu

To create the partitions necessary, I used EaseUS Partition Manager (its FREE!) after having some difficulties with Acronis Disk Manager. Then I used Etcher (it's also FREE!) to create the bootable USB after downloading Ubuntu 18.04 LTS from their own website. Now, I should be all good to go...

Legacy BIOS?

...or so I thought. I restarted my computer, but it didn't recognize the bootable USB. I went into my BIOS and disabled Secure Boot which I thought would do the trick, but yet again that didn't work. Next, I tried changing UEFI BIOS to Legacy BIOS, restarted my computer, and that did the trick. I decided I was fine with booting from legacy BIOS since I am not going to need a hard drive >2TB. Now that I've completed the installation, I have officially entered the world of Linux.