Dual-booting your system has various advantages over running an operating system on a virtual machine. When you dual boot a system you have complete control over system resources, unlike virtual machines where system resource gets shared among the multiple operating systems.
Canonical has recently released the new version of Ubuntu which is Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. It is the LTS version of Ubuntu which is released once in two years and gets official support for five years.
If you are looking to run Ubuntu without formatting the disk then here is a guide on how to install and run Ubuntu on Windows PC.
In this article, I will discuss how to dual boot Ubuntu with Windows 11 operating system.
Prerequisites
We are assuming here that you have a system running Windows 11 and we have to install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS along with it.
- You should have at least 20 GB of space on your system for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS installation
- Download Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and create a Ubuntu live disk. To create a ubuntu live disk in the Windows OS you could download and use the Rufus application.
- To boot from USB you need to disable the secure boot in your system
- We recommend you take the backup of your existing operating system so that your data can be recovered in case of system failure.
Creating free space on the hard disk for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS installation
First, boot your system to Windows 11, and to allocate space for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS installation follow the steps below –
- Click on start and type computer management.
- When an application appears with the name computer management, click on it.
- Next click on the storage.
- In the next window click on disk management.
- Identify and right-click on the partition that you are going to shrink to allocate the space for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
- Next, click on the shrink and enter the amount of space that you want to allocate, and again click on shrink. This will create free unallocated space as you can see in the image below.
How to boot from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS live disk?
Plug the USB and restart your system, press F10 or F12 to display the boot menu. Now select the Ubuntu live disk from the menu and start the installation.
In some systems to boot from USB, you need to disable the secure boot. Secure boot is the feature that allows the PC to boot only through manufacturer-trusted firmware.
Start the installation of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
It will take a few seconds to boot, and then you will see the given window, here click on Try or Install Ubuntu.
In the next window, you will be asked to select to try or install Ubuntu on your system, to install Ubuntu click on Install Ubuntu.
Next, select the keyboard layout and click on Continue.
Next, you will have to choose between normal installation or minimal installation. A normal installation will install softwares such as office software, games, media player, etc. And in the minimal installation, it will install only necessary things such as a web browser and basic utilities.
In other options, I will recommend choosing both Download updates while installing Ubuntu and Install third-party software for graphics and wifi hardware and additional media formats.
Choose your options and click on Continue.
Select installation type i.e. Erase disk and install Ubuntu or something else. In the first option, the whole disk will be formatted and Ubuntu will be installed on it. And in something else option you can create, and resize partition manually.
Select Something else and click on Continue.
How to create Ubuntu partitions manually?
When you click on something else you will move to a new screen where you can see the free space that you had created from the inside of Windows OS.
So here I created a 20 GB space so we will create the following partitions for Ubuntu installation –
- / – Root partition 8 GB
- /home -Home partition of 8 GB of size
- /swap – Swap of size 4GB
You might be thinking about why the swap partition is 4GB. So you could decide the right amount of swap space by reading an article on the swap.
Please read the how-to manually partition a disk during Ubuntu installation.
Once all the partitions are created you can proceed with installation by clicking on Install Now.
This may ask you for your permission to format the partitions, click on Continue.
Next, you need to select your location, if you are connected to the internet your location will be detected automatically. Check if it is correct or not and then click on Continue.
In the next window, you will ask to enter the username it will be used for login. When you enter your name it will automatically suggest a computer’s name, you can edit it also. The computer name is how you will appear on the network. Next, choose a strong password, the installer will suggest if it is too short.
Other options are to Log in automatically, Require my password to log in, and Use Active Directory. I will suggest selecting the second one. This will stop the people to access the data on your computer.
Enabling the third option i.e. Use Active Directory will ask you for further details like domain.
After entering your details and selecting the options click on Continue.
This will start the installation process as you can see in the image below.
Once the installation gets complete you need to restart your system in order to use it. Click on Restart Now to restart your system.
On the next boot, you will see the option of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Windows 11 on the grub screen.
Select the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS option to boot. Now the following image shows the desktop of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
Now I hope you find this guide useful if you have any thoughts related to this, you can share them with us in the comments below.
Thank you after creating the partition in Windows 11, Ubuntu install was able to install side by side on its own, no need to “do something different” in Ubuntu install to create the partition if found the space it need.