Learning Ubuntu #2 - Partitions, and getting started

Well, I am posting this entry using FireFox running under Ubuntu on my laptop. When I went to install the other night, the Ubuntu disk partitioning was not giving me the "Guided Install" option. It turned out that this was because my Toshiba L300 laptop comes from the factory with 4 partitions:

1. A small EISA partition - this is a hidden partition - not really sure what this is for - sounds like Toshiba uses this to store setup info based on the searches I did. Also, it sounded dangerous to delete, so I decided to leave it alone.
   
2. The C: drive, where Vista is
3. A D: drive which is empty and apparently was where the french version of Windows was, and which was deleted when I selected the language as english when I bought the machine.
4. A medium sized hidden partition which is where Toshiba stashes the recovery copy of Vista

So, because there were 4 primary partitions (which is the max supported), Ubuntu was not able to offer me guidance for partitioning. After doing my research, I became sure that deleting the D: partition would be safe, and that is what i did.

After that, when I booted from the Ubuntu CD I created the other night, the install proceeded fine, and I ended up with two new partitions - one for Ubunto and one for a paging file.

To make sure I new what was going on, I did a little research, and found out about gparted, and even better, I found out how easy to use the "add/remove applications" function is to use. I installed gparted, and confirmed that an extended partition was created to hold the two new partions, and all is looking good.

Spent an hour or two just knocking around in Ubuntu, and it all looks good. More to report shortly.