How can I change my Windows XP to Ubuntu 10.04

[Labeeb]

At present I am running Windows XP on my computer. But I want to switch to Ubuntu 10.04. I would like to install Ubuntu 10.04 over Windows XP on this machine. Is this possible? Could you help me out in this setup? The reason behind this is that my computer is running Windows XP SP1 and I am unable to find SP3 CD or setup. I don't want to remain behind in this emerging world and so I decided to install Ubuntu 10.04. So the question, how can I change my Windows XP to Ubuntu 10.04?

[Aleksandra]

Your question seems quite confusing. I am unable to get what you are trying to say. However, according to me whatever I have understood, you want to install Ubuntu on your computer and replace Windows XP. For this you just need the ISO file which you can download from Ubuntu website. Create an image file from this ISO and burn it on a CD or DVD. Insert this CD or DVD into your disk drive, start the installation. You can even refer some guidelines that are present on Ubuntu website which will help you to know how you want to proceed with the installation.

[Elijah]

But why do you want to remove your Windows? OK I can understand your eagerness to be with the world but there is no harm to have Windows along with Ubuntu on your hard drive running. You can still have Windows, while you will be working on Ubuntu all the time. This is possible and you just have to create a separate NTFS partition to run Ubuntu on your drive, Ubuntu comes with a NTFS driver by default which will allow you to read your NTFS files which you have created in Windows. Since you running already Windows on your computer you have to manually create the partition for Ubuntu. For this go to Control Panel - Administrative tools - Computer Management - Disk Management. Here you can use the partition manager to shrink the partitions to create some free space.

[Luis234]

You can first run your Ubuntu on your computer, without installing it and see if you will able to run it on your computer. Burn the iso file that you have downloaded containing Ubuntu 10.04 into a disk. Insert the disk and boot with it, select the option which says try with out installing. You will get the Desktop. Go to the terminal and click on terminal tab. Type in the command: sudo fdisk -l. This will tell you if you can install Ubuntu on this machine. I suppose you have to format your partition with a filesystem that will work with Linux.

[MrChris-]

Yes he is right. Linux actually uses different filesystem when compared to Windows. I don't think you can use Windows files on Linux platform. The filesystem that are supported in Linux include ext4 or ext3. However, these filesystems are unrecognized under Windows platform. Although Linux can read NTFS files but the file permissions are simply ignored in Linux. Moreover, sometimes NTFS files are often shown as exe files in Linux. This is the major drawback of using Windows NTFS files on Linux platform.