All good you might thing, well think again.  I know people love linux and I love parts of linux for example mythtv and all the open source stuff that is out there.  The parts that I hate about linux are the ease of getting even the basic things to work.  When I performed the dpkg install I got an error because the adobe package had a dependence on libcurl3.  Knowing I’d seen this before on my tv box I knew it was not easy to get around.  So rather than trying to hack the solution I thought I would try and find another route.

The other route eventually turned up in a great little 10 things to do after installing ubuntu.

http://linuxchronicles.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/10-things-to-do-after-installing-ubuntu-810/

I’d just googled to re-find the link and I’m worried about the number of 10 things to do after installing ubuntu… Thankfully there is another package for flash that can be done from apt-get.

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

So after downloading the .img file from the ubuntu website I needed a usb pen to boot the laptop into a live CD version of UNR.  Unfortunately I did not have one so I popped down to PC World of all places!! and got a sandisk 8GB usb pen for £12.99.

Once back I tried to use Unetbootin to install the distro onto the USB pen unfortunately this caused problems when trying to live book.  Everytime I ended up with a loading please wait….. and then dropping into a BusyBox prompt (what ever that is!!! I’m a geek but not a linux geek.)  I went back to the usb pen and installed UNR using the Ubuntu instructions and this seemed to sort the problem out.  After having a play with the live version I decided to setup the dual boot system.  So while I was in the live CD I used the partition manager inbuilt to reduce the size of the windows disk.

After the reboot I let windows boot first before doing the install, I thought this was probably a good idea because it would have been a nightmare if my windows XP partition was no longer working!!!  Windows went into a disk scan but worked fine after the shrinking of the disk size.

After another reboot!!!! I booted from the usb stick again and followed the install of the distro into the spare space.  It was certainly easier than the last time I did an install of linux.

So I’m now writing this post from my nice shiny new UNR install.