Finally I am up with the Ubuntu on my vaio notebook. I was totally fed up of vista, which was sucking up the memory with its beast like processes. It was so sluggish that it was getting harder and harder to bear with. I am still keeping the copy of vista on my notebook as its the licensed version and Sony didn't ship any CD for it, just the recovery partition. Although i have made the recovery DVDs, but these DVDs will just copy the OS to machine (something different than installing) and will wipe off any partitions (and hence the data) that is written on other partitions. OEM sucks!!!
Anyways, the installation has not been particularly smooth. I had to install linux twice because once the system was booted from the recovery partition. damn, it removed the linux partition. Then i went on to modify the GRUB's menu.lst to hide the vista's recovery partition from the boot menu. WARNING: if you are installing linux and have vista's recovery partition, the boot loader may show two Vista/Longhorn OS under 'Other Operating Systems'. In such case, first boot in linux, edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst and comment out entry for the OS thats is poiting to recovery partition. (You will probably have to google a bit about GRUB)
Thank God, I had already copied all my data to another laptop (through network). Will have to copy that back. Well that was expected, and windows had warned me about it. But my point is they should keep a provision for keeping other drives intact. Now its all done, and am bit relaxed.
I am a complete linux newbie, and i hardly know anything about this OS. Am gearing up myself to use it now on for my development works. Ubuntu looks very user-friendly and is quick. But there are many things for which i may have to turn back to vista for a while.
I am happy :) as am posting this blog using ubuntu. Will post more about the same very soon.