Installing Ubuntu alongside windows 8/10
Have you been using windows and would like to try out Ubuntu but are not ready to jump in all the way yet? Well, the good news is that you can run Ubuntu alongside windows.
Read along and by the end of the article, you will have a windows laptop running ubuntu too. Pretty cool right?… I know.
This guide assumes you already have windows installed on your machine(laptop/desktop)
Step 1: Preparing Windows Machine for Dual Boot
First things first we need to prepare our Windows machine for dual boot.
In order to do this, we need to create space on the machine’s hard drive for a partition on which we can then install Ubuntu.
- Login to you your windows machine and start command prompt by simply searching for it. When it comes up, run as administrator.
2. When Command prompt starts, type in diskmgmt.msc and it will open up the Disk Management window
3. From here, right click on C:/ partition and select Shrink Volume in order to resize the partition.
On Shrink C: enter a value on space to shrink in MB (use at least 20000 MB depending on the C: partition size) and hit Shrink to start partition resize as illustrated below (the value of space shrink from below image is lower and only used for demonstration purposes).
Once, space has been resized you will see a new unallocated space on the hard drive. Leave it as default and reboot the computer in order to proceed with Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS installation.
Step 2: Installing Ubuntu
You can download Ubuntu here:
Once you download the iso file you can create a bootable flash disk using a software of your choice in my case I used lili usb creator which you can download here:
You are now ready to install ubuntu.
Restart your machine and go to the boot menu e.g for Dell its F12 and choose boot from USB.
This will bring up the screen below if you would like to just see ubuntu features click on try Ubuntu .These will be lost once you restart your machine. In our case, we are picking install ubuntu.
You can then pick your type of installation preferably Normal installation.
You will then be asked the type of installation you want in our case we would like to Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 10.
When the installation is done, you get the message below:
Voila, you can now use Ubuntu alongside Windows 10.
To alternate between the two operating system, you can select the operating system you want to use at startup.
Now you can compare the two operating systems, happy coding.
