Finally I got some time away from my work and I decided to explore something new. I decided to install Ubuntu. I am familiar with Windows and the Mac but I haven’t really touched Ubuntu. So I shrink my Windows Vista partition by 60 GB and throw in Ubuntu to dual-boot.

In this test procedure, first we create a new partition (/dev/hda2) using un-partitioned disk space. A new volume group (TestVG) and logical volume (TestLV) are then created using a physical volume created on the partition. An ext3 filesystem is then created on the logical volume, it is checked, and then mounted.

Ubuntu is one of many Linux distributions with support for LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager. LVM is a disk partitioning scheme that brings a level of flexibility to disk management that is not possible with the traditional method. With LVM, you can, if necessary, increase the size of a partition online, that is, while the system is running, without unmounting the partition.

If you read our "what's new in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala" post, you must know that a new hard disk tool is now available by default in Ubuntu 9.10: Palimpsest Disk Utility, which was created by Red Hat and is a S.M.A.R.T.

The installation program on Ubuntu desktop is pretty basic. It lacks the other features, like support for LVM, RAID, and full disk encryption, that the Ubuntu text installer edition has. By default, it creates just one partition onto which it installs everything.

Fedora 14 is the latest update to the Red Hat-sponsored, Linux distribution. It is one of a handful of Linux distributions that use LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager, as the default disk partitioning scheme. The installer creates three logical volumes by default, besides the non-LVM /boot partition.

One of the first things I did when I moved from Vista to Ubuntu was install a nice looking theme. The default Ubuntu theme is pretty decent, but I dont like the brown and when browsing posts like this and this, I knew I wanted a sexier look for my laptop.

Ubuntu doesn’t require a lot of disk space to install, but if you’ve installed in a virtual machine with a small virtual drive, or partitioned most of your disk for your /home, you may need to free up some space on a system occasionally.

For partitions created on Logical Volume Manager (LVM) (Linux feature) at install time, they can be resized easily by concatenating extents onto them or truncating extents from them over multiple storage devices without major system reconfiguration.