Recently I’ve purchased an Acer Aspire 5741G. It ships with Windows 7 pre-installed. Nowadays most manufacturers consider it a good idea to equip their notebooks with an extra partition which holds all data necessary to recover your Windows installation. So if your installation is screwed up (think of a virus or something) you can put your notebook back into factory default. Of course the operating system of my choice is Ubuntu rather than Windows 7. However, I wished to keep a functional Windows partition and recovery partition just in case I plan to sell the notebook in a few years. Thus I wanted my Windows partition to be repartitioned in order to install Ubuntu alongside Windows. Ubuntu’s installation guide explains here that this could be done as part of the installation procedure. And indeed this was dead easy. I just needed to to configure via a slider how big I wished the Windows partition to be. Installation succeeded without any problems.
After booting Ubuntu the Hardware Drivers application asked me if it should install and activate drivers for the Wifi card and the graphics card. Of course I accepted and within seconds my graphics card was configured and access to my WLAN was set up. A quick test of the keyboards function keys and he SD-card reader (I expected both to be problematic) revealed that everything works fine.
