Learning at the expense of windows.

[polyinterest]

G'day all,

I have in my possession a shinny new Asus Ultrabook core i5 with a hybrid drive and complete with windows 8. I am a loyal disciple to Apple. And ten minutes on this OS had me convinced that microsoft isn't to concerned about producing a finished product.

However, I have also recently experienced Linux Ubuntu. This was a very pleasant surprise.

What I'm planning to do is obvious. Trash Win8 and install a Linux distro as a stand alone. This can be done right?(I have to ask that one)

However, rather than trying to just kill and slash the Windows platform. Is there a way I can remove it by manipulating bios and uefi? I have been reading up on how I think it could happen. I am new to this hacking thing and look forward to learning a little more.

I would like to know more about the intrinsic nature of how a computer works, any help or reading material would be appreciated.

Also, can I install a distro straight onto the drive or should I have something like Grub2 or Lilo on there.

Is it possible or worth the effort to dual boot with two distros of Linux?

Thanks.

[Mr-Protocol]

There really isn't a way to get rid of Windows other than reformatting the disk.

Reading material would be maybe A+ Certification books to get you started.

The distro will typically install Grub for you. That is just a boot loader.

You can dual boot multi distros, but there really is no point. Dual booting Windows and Linux I can see useful.

[Sebkinne]

To answer your questions in a basic way:

Yes, this can be done. All you need is a CD/DVD drive or a USB port.

You can then burn the Ubuntu ISO to a CD/DVD or put it onto a USB drive using something like unetbootin. Unetbootin will actually also download Ubuntu for you and then proceed to install it onto the USB.

Now, when you boot from CD/USB, you will be taken into an installation wizard - follow that and it will guide you through the installation. It will install GRUB for you.

In terms of "removing" the partition, I am not sure what you mean. Get rid of it entirely? That has nothing to do with the bios / uefi - partitions are kept on disk. Don't worry about this though, when installing Ubuntu, it gives you some options: Use the entire disk, install alongside windows and a few custom ones. Choose whatever fits you best. Just remember that if you remove the windows partition or use the entire disk for the install - Windows and all of the files will be gone.

I hope this gave some clarity.

Best Regards,

Sebkinne