dual booting windows 7 and ubuntu 11.10 on lenovo x120e

This was a bit trickier than I hoped it would be. I didn't really want to reinstall windows 7 and the default ubuntu install didn't seem to detect the right partition to overwrite MBR (or Windows 7 was doing something odd). In lieu of digging into what was really going on I ended up adding an entry to the windows 7 bootloader using BCDEdit, following these directions. I diverged from those instructions by running the "dd" command immediately after install while still within the ubuntu live environment (thereby avoiding the reboot). Following that route seemed to be the quickest. I tried the alternate iso route earlier but it turned out that wasn't necessary with 11.10.

Hope this helps out anyone else out there dealing with the same issue. If this is unclear I can add more details. This was done with the amd64 11.10 iso, default partition was /dev/sda5 for me, I could mount the main windows 7 system partition with the ubuntu disk utility (it mounted to /media/Windows7_OS). Those would likely be the defaults for someone else going this route as well but YMMV.

upgrading PostgreSQL on Debian/Ubuntu

I've been upgrading pg on a few servers today. One from 8.1 to 8.4 (debian) and the other from 8.2 to 8.4 (ubuntu). In both cases the process worked as noted here (though I used aptitude):

1. backup your db(s)


2. add backports repositories ubuntu, debian instructions (don't forget about pinning)

Then

aptitude install postgresql-8.4
pg_dropcluster --stop 8.4 main
pg_upgradecluster 8.1 main

Once you're sure that's working:

pg_dropcluster --stop 8.1 main
apt-get remove postgresql-8.1