Shattleworth strikes back

While Ballmer is trying to impose Windows to Nigerian schoolchildren by foul means, Ubuntu is slowly and steadily spreading in the whole world.

Returning home with a freshly bought Dell Inspion 1520 under my arm, I found in the mailbox a package with two Ubuntu discs. As they say - it's a destiny )

I wanted to spend some time under Vista, get used to baubles, but evidently now I will set up Linux, just at weekends. The keeping of two OSes is a kind of schizophrenia - something you do here, something - there, the constantly shortcuts confusing, and you bite your elbows when you have to reboot for the sake of something.

I'm planning the following:
From LiveCD to sort out the sound and a problem with the hard drive. If everything will be ok, Windows can be teared down.
Update 14.10.2007: I booted from LiveCD and installed irqbalance_0.55-2_amd64.deb and linux-backports-modules-2.6.22-14-generic_2.6.22-14.9_amd64.deb. Could invent nothing more sensible, uploaded all snd_ modules manually and executed modprobe snd_hda_intel. Now sound works.

To remove Recovery and Media Direct partitions, create tiny(5-10м) Media Direct partition at the end of disk. To install Grub there. To set up under Windows Media Direct button for the working with this partition. If everything will be ok, I'll move further.
Update 16.11.2007: I could not place MediaDirect part with grub on logical disk for some reason. But with /dev/sda4 it works.
The further I get the more discoveries I have. Three operating systems pre-installed by dell to the new computer - it's cool. Moreover, initially I thought that bios menu item Diagnostic starts diagnostic programm from the first hidden partition of the hard disk. Not by any means. If to arm with grub and boot from (hd0, 0) then DOS but very pretty testing programm is started. It's the 7th year of the twenty-first century, on my new computer the mouse is working under DOS again ).
And from BIOS tests with the text-mode interface are run. Maybe it is embedded in BIOS? Then maybe, the first hidden partition is not needed at all?

Instead of Vista I've installed Ubuntu with the second grub, and the first grub is set to start ubuntu with some 8 run level, which will boot the absolute minimum, just for mplayer starting ).

Yes, one more thing: after the instalattion I'll have to fix splash screen, but it seems to be very easy.

Link Dump: What is MediaDirect 3? Inside the Dell Utility Partition

Update 26.11.2007: And my little sister received Ubuntu disks just on her birthday. That's marketing ))