lenovo x60 and linux

my brandy new lenovo.x60 tablet pc was delivered today. it is exactly the size i had in mind, rivaling my 12" powerbook for the 'most useful size' award.

needless to say, the darned thing came with a brand new version of the business edition of vista. so, i immediately had plans to upgrade to one of my favorite flavors of linux. the good news, i suppose, is that my research.aide convinced me that i should keep vista (since i paid for it... ) and should set up a dual-boot system. but, this raised several interesting questions.

1) how to repartition the hard drive?? on principle, i refused to pay for any new win.software. i was pleasantly surprised that vista allows you to 'shrink' the hard drive; but, returned to reality, when the disk management utility would only allow me to create a 30Gb partition (of 100Gb).

so... off to the Spring 2007.1 dvd of Mandriva. booting on an external usb dvd drive was painless (remember to hit 'f12'); but, the mandriva disk resizing program failed.

2) now to the Kubuntu 7.04 dvd. again, booting went just fine, and i repartitioned the hd to a 70Gb linux partition and a 30Gb vista partition. the installation was completed without a hitch..

upon rebooting; i was kindly greeted by a nice 'selection' screen asking to choose the operating system. curiously, there were 2 vista choices... the 1st option led me to the lenovo recovery system. the 2nd began by running chkdsk, and rebooted. vista started normally (if you call that normal... it is s...o...o...o s....l....o....w...!).

i have to admit thinking at this point... why am i keeping this system?

finally, i rebooted and chose to start kubuntu. it booted right up. most of the pc-stuff worked... but, as i began to load the new wacom driver, i started to wonder about mandriva again....

so.... back to the mandriva 2007.1 boot dvd. at this point, i decided to remove the ext3 and swap partitions created by kubuntu; then autoallocate a new set of partitions via the custom disk partitioning option in mandriva. i quite like having a separate /home partition, to make upgrades easier!

more to come...