How to migrate from Vista to Ubuntu

Question

If I have a Widows (Vista) machine and I want to install Ubuntu and run both OSes. How do I do that? Advisable yes/no and why?

I tried Ubuntu a great many years ago and would like to do so again but am not a techie.

Any help you can give, or point me to a good source as to how to do this, would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Advisable: yes. The sunset date for Vista is on 11 April 2017 so you'd better start now. I did the same thing a year ago and deleted Vista about 6 months ago.

Some advice on strategy:

1. Install all the open source software you can find that can replace your current software on the Vista machine and make them the default! (One per week, so you get the hang of them)
   • VLC for video playing
   • LibreOffice for Office automation
   • FileZilla for FTP stuff
   • Firefox as a web browser
   • Evolution / Thunderbird for mail
   • qBittorrent
   • GIMP
   • gedit
2. Download the end-user manual.
3. Backup your entire system using the CloneZilla Live CD (use disk-to-image) before you start on an external HDD!
4. Delete/off-load unimportant files on the same external HDD.
5. Shrink the Windows partition using gparted from the Ubuntu Live CD so there is at least 24GB for the Ubuntu partition available
6. Create 3 partitions for Ubuntu: swap (look here how to calculate your RAM size) / (24GB at least) and then move your /home directory on the same "drive" as you currently store the windows "users" directory (probably c:\users)

How to install Ubuntu: click here