Problems installing Ubuntu

After hearing so much about it, I recently sent off for and received the Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS Desktop Edition operating system. I have a laptop Compaq series pp2140. 1.3GHz Athlon processor, 512Mb Ram, 30Gb Toshiba hard drive. Windows XP professional. I want to install the Ubuntu system along side windows XP. Before hand I defragment the hard drive in Windows XP and made sure there was plenty of spare room on my hard drive. The laptops 30Gb hard drive is partitioned into two parts. C: part which is holds the window xp operating system is 20Gb in total and has 11.8Gb free space. D: part is 8.4Gb in size all of which is free space. I booted my laptop with the Ubuntu CD in the tray and the Ubuntu operating system loaded and started correctly. To install the system I followed the advise on the following site: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Installing-Ubuntu-7-10-68645.shtml I double clicked the install icon on the desktop. Proceeded through the first 3 steps without problem. On the fourth step there are three choices on how to partition the hard disk. [i]1. Guided – use entire disk. 2. Guided – use largest continuous free space. 3. Manual.[/i] When I select the second choice as is recommended by the above guide I get the following error message: [quote] Failed to partition the selected disk This probably happened because the selected disk or free space is too small to be automatically partitioned. [/quote] Is my hard disk too small to install Ubuntu? Any other advise on this would be helpful as well.

For a typical desktop installation, 8GB should be enough. Select the manual partitioning, delete what is now D:, select the "free space" and then "new partition", set the size to 512MB, set "use as: swap space" and then hit "ok". Now select "free space" and "new partition" again, select "use as: ext3", "mount point: /", click "ok", the click "forward" and you are good to go. The installer will probably cry about swap space being too low, just ignore that and continue with the installation. Have fun. [Modified by: Glock24 on October 05, 2008 08:33 PM]

[quote=james]Thankyou for the advise Glock24, most helpful. It worked and Ubuntu is up and running on my laptop.[/quote] Glad to hear that, I hope you enjoy it.