Help me Installing Ubuntu on a Win 7 laptop

[lnknprkfrevr]

Hello There .

I have a HP-Pavilion G4 netbook with Win 7 x86 SP1 on it.

I have a 320GB Hard drive and 4gb ram.

I wanted to install Ubuntu Desktop 11.10. I'm a total noobie with Linux.

From 320gb i have partitioned 40gb and installed Ubuntu 11.10 on it.

I followed a guide on youtube to install Ubuntu 11.10 from USB alongside windows 7.

I gave 37gb to ' / ' (root) and 3gb to swap area.

While i as partitioning for ubuntu installation there were other partitions called /usr , /var , etc. .

And when i tried to install some drivers, they fail and saved a log in /var. I did not create /var while i was installing ubuntu.

Now all i want to know is that are these partitions necessary ?

If yes, how many are necessary ?

My Ubuntu shows 350mb of system updates , but i cannot install them because i'm not sure i did a correct installation or not.

Please Help me(noobie) in this regard.

Thanks in advance.

 

[wolfeking]

ok, what you are doing is making it way to complicated. If you go back and reformat your Ubuntu 40GB partition, just format it to EXT4 and / boot marker. Only make 1 partition. Then install. Ubuntu will auto correct to make all the required partitions. And on 4GB of RAM, you do not really need swap space.