Will this be ok?

mikeyk

Member
I am looking to get a desktop, dual-booted with windows 7 and Ubuntu, will all these components work with that?

Processor (CPU)
AMD PHENOM II X4 965 (3.40GHz/8MB CACHE/AM3) - BLACK EDITION

Motherboard
ASUS® M4A78LT-M: mATX MAINBOARD, DDR3, USB 2.0, SATA 3.0Gb/s

Memory (RAM)
8GB SAMSUNG DDR3 DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (2 X 4GB)

Graphics Card
1GB AMD RADEON™ HD6450 - DVI,HDMI,VGA - DX® 11

Memory - 1st Hard Disk
500GB SERIAL ATA 3-Gb/s HARD DRIVE WITH 8MB CACHE (7,200rpm)

Network Facilities
ONBOARD GIGABIT LAN & WIRELESS 802.11N 300Mbps PCI CARD (£16)

Also I'm new to Linux, so basically assumed from what I've heard Ubuntu would be the best to start out with, am i right? And how would you recommend the hard drive is partitioned?
 

pcdan

Bronze Level Poster
id prob go with 50GB for each OS then you got the 400GB left for apps / storage
but if u have the budge id probably go for the WD black drives for more cache to open files and apps faster than that 1
 

barrydrake

Silver Level Poster
I'd STRONGLY recommend having two hard drives, and let Ubuntu follow it's defaults and install on the boot drive with Windows pre-installed on the other. Grub installation will then find Windows and work just fine! Dual boot from a single drive with Win 7 can be problematical, and not for the Linux newbie. Depends on how geeky you are really.

At the moment, I'm having problems with an Asus mobo and Ubuntu 64 bit on 11.04 but 10.10 is fine. To make use of all your ram, you will need 64 bit, but some of the apps. I want to run (eg Skype) there is no 64 bit version .... My recommendation - use 32 bit 11.04 and forget full use of the ram under Ubuntu .... Ubuntu is so much faster than Windows that you won't really need to worry. Those with greater knowledge than I might want to challenge some of the above.
 

mikeyk

Member
So basically get two hard drives and have linux installed on the first one? Also to install the 32 bit version of ubuntu instead of 64? I mean how bad is it to get the 64 bit one?
 

barrydrake

Silver Level Poster
Nearly .... install Windows first and test it. Install Ubuntu to the other drive letting it format to the defaults. Then change the boot order under the bios BEFORE re-starting and you should see a grub screen ready prepared to dual boot. Big advantage - when you tire of Windows, you can just re-format the Windows drive to ext4 and use it for extra storage. Unless you are a gamer, you will be doing this within a few months if not weeks so if you don't already have a licensed copy of Windows, I suggest that you try Ubuntu for four weeks before buying one.

64 bit 11.04 currently won't boot for me. I'll try testing Alpha 1 11.10; out soon. Maybe that's fixed. Currently it gets most of the way and then crashes - something to do with the X gui stuff. OTOH Meercat (10.10) works just fine but as I say, some apps just are not available for 64 bit yet, so if you need any of them, tough! Windows is the same I guess.
 
Last edited:

barrydrake

Silver Level Poster
Further thought: check out compatibility before paying for a wireless card. My experience is you may be better getting a cheap usb dongle on e-bay with guaranteed Linux compatibility.
 

mikeyk

Member
Ok, cool doesnt sound too bad :). This is probably gonna sound like stupid question, but is there no real advantage to getting the 64 bit version?
 

barrydrake

Silver Level Poster
Only if you do processor-heavy tasks - like rendering videos or something like that. I keep a 64-bit version of 10.10 on dual boot for that purpose. Otherwise, I'm running Natty (11.04).
 
Top