Alienware 14 and Ubuntu, solved

I was finally able to install Ubuntu 13.04 on my Alienware 14 laptop and dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I could only get 13.04 to work, 13.10 would not.

My system came with Windows 7 preinstalled on a 750G MBR formatted hard drive, installed in Legacy mode with secure boot off.

To install it, I booted the Ubuntu live CD in recovery mode, shrank the OS partition down to 100G with Gparted,(make it whatever size you want), created an Extended partition, with Gparted, (with the rest of the drive), and created a 50G Logical drive for Ubuntu, and an 8G partition for a swap partition, all with Gparted. I then installed it, selecting ("other", or "something else", I don't remember what it's called), when asked how I wanted to install Ubuntu, selected sda5,(the partition I previously created), click on the "change" selection, and selected sda5, ext4 and format. I selected sda3 to install the boot loader. Once installed, reboot, and update the system. Grub is automatically installed and the laptop boots to it and gives you your choice of OS's

One note, the onboard wifi  wouldn't work with Ubuntu after the install, I'm using a Rosewell RNX-N150HG  USB WIFI adapter , http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833166068 , to connect to the Internet. Also the Ethernet doesn't work, but the video and the sound does. I figure I need to install correct drivers in Ubuntu to get these to work and I haven't found them yet.

Hopefully this will help someone out that wants to dual boot Windows7 and Ubuntu on this laptop.

There may be other versions of Linux that will work on this machine, but so far I haven't found any. I tried Zorin 7.1, it installed, but the video would only show in  4:3 aspect ratio. I believe it's because the Intel video driver won't load. When I downloaded it from Intel and tried to install it I got an error message saying it wasn't supported.

If anyone has any questions, or needs me to clarify something, let me know and I'll do what I can to help.

Snyde