Setting up a new Laptop (2021 Edition)

It's been 6 years since I last setup a dual booting laptop. That particular machine is starting to show its age now, particularly with a spinning disk hard-drive.

Before doing anything I created a Recovery USB. Search Recovery Drive on the task bar to open Recovery Media Creator. I followed the instructions to setup a recovery drive on a 32GB USB drive.

The new machine has a 1TB SSD and I wanted to really keep as much as possible for Windows. So, I checked how much space I used on my existing Linux install. The command df . -BG is useful for this. giving space used in GB. It turned out I had only used 75 GB. 

I downloaded the Ubuntu 21.10 ISO and used Startup Disk Creator to flash it to an old 4GB USB stick

To free up space for the Linux installation I needed to shrink the Windows disk partition. I used the Windows tool for this. Search for "Create and format hard disk partitions". This opened the Disk Management Tool:

I right-clicked on the main Windows Partition and selected Shrink... I then shrank by 150GB.

Once everything was in place. I inserted the Ubuntu USB and rebooted. For this machine I needed to explicitly tell it to boot from the USB by hitting F12 during startup to be able to change the boot order.

A welcome screen should pop up with options to Try Ubuntu or Install Ubuntu. Select the latter and follow the next screens, selecting language, keyboard and Wi-Fi when asked. 

• When you get to Installation Type select "Something else, you can create or resize partitions yourself"

This will open a window listing the partitions. The empty 150GB partition created earlier is visible here. Select it and click on + to create a new partition. Do this twice:

1. Create a Swap Partition. Select Logical Partition, beginning of this space and choose a size (I used 4GB) and under Mount point choose Swap
2. Create a Root Partition. Select Primary Partition, beginning of this space and let it take the remaining space. Under Mount point choose /

Previously I created a home partition but decided I didn't really need it this time.

After going through the remaining screens the installation proceeded. 

Jittery screen

The Ubuntu installation was a success but the screen did have jitters, especially duing start up. I found the solution to this by editing /etc/default/grub and changing the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.enable_psr=0"

After editing enter sudo update-grub and reboot

PSR is a Power saving setting (Panel Self Refresh) used to optimise power consumed by buffering some frames to the display when the view is static.

Bitlocker

After rebooting I now got the Grub menu to be able to select Ubuntu or Windows. When I selected Windows however I got a warning screen popup

"The system boot information has changed since BitLocker was enabled. You must supply a BitLocker recovery password to start this system."

I was able to log onto my Microsoft Account to obtain the recovery key: aka.ms/myrecoverykey

The machine can now boot easily to Windows or Ubuntu.