Installation Blues - 1

First things first. There are a multitude of things that can go wrong while installing Linux. Driver issues were common in the past. But all that is now gone. In most cases you know beforehand whether the OS would work on your computer or not, thanks to LiveCD.

A live CD or live DVD is a CD or DVD containing a bootable computer operating system. Live CDs are unique in that they have the ability to run a complete, modern operating system on a computer lacking mutable secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive.

A live CD finds it's use in more than one way. So always keep one in hand, it doesn't matter whether it's the newest version or not. I have used it innumerable times to rescue the system- both Windows and Linux.

Most of the starters will be installing linux as dual-boot, ie. Both Windows/Mac and Linux in the same system. Ubuntu and most other distributions have complete support for this and grub (the default bootloader[1]) does it automatically. But one thing- NEVER hibernate the other operating system before you are going to install linux. The problem here is that grub would not be able to read those drives and hence locate the other system. You will have to manually configure grub later which we'd like to avoid. I'll report further on installation as and when they come to mind..

[1]The bootloader typically loads the main operating system for the computer.