I probably should’ve written this while I was doing the install. Oh well, maybe next time.

I managed to get Ubuntu installed on an external hard drive today. The problem started with me trying to figure out if I could resize the dual boot set up I have on my Macbook. Reading through my options, I decided it was too hard and I had other things to do- like work on my Hugo migration from yesterday.

Then I thought, “Oh, well I have a spare external drive, I wonder how easy it is to install an OS on there”. A quick search led me to this video, and with a few modifications, I was up and running.

Here’s how I did it (More detailed instructions are in the video, I’m writing this from memory):

• Download an .iso file. I got mine from the Ubuntu site.

• Flash it to a USB drive using Etcher

• Insert the USB,restart the Mac, holding Alt when it boots up, and boot to the live USB you just made

• Open a Terminal and type sudo gparted

• Insert the external drive

• Change the drive you are looking at to the external drive

• Partition the drive into whatever sized chunks you want, as long as the following are satisfied:

  • The “Main” partition should be formatted to Ext4 Linux Journaled
  • Mount this “Main” partition on /
  • Make a smaller partition formatted to Linux swap, it should be about 4GB (That’s what the guy in the video did, I’ve heard there’s a lot of debate about how much swap space you should have. I went with 4GB to keep things simple)

• At the bottom of the GUI, there’s a drop down menu for where the boot loader should sit. Give it the option of wherever your external drive is mounted, but the option with no numbers at the end. It will look something like /sdd

• Run the partition

• Close the windows and open up the Install Ubuntu wizard that’s sitting on the Desktop

• Run through the wizard until it asks how you want to install Ubuntu, pick the Something else option

• Pick your external drive as where you want Ubuntu to be installed. Double check you picked the right one, or else you risk losing data

• … Finish the wizard and reboot your computer, loading up your new Ubuntu installation

I think that’s all of the steps. From there, do what you normally would do and run updates, install new software, pick out a theme and some icons.

I’ve been in this rabbithole of picking a new Desktop Environment. After going through a ton of posts on the very SFW r/UnixPorn, I decided to go with i3. I’m still not sure about how to use a lot of things. Maybe 30 minutes before writing this post, I figured out how to switch workspaces.

So tomorrow will probably be real work, but later this week, I’ll detail all of the stuff I’ve been downloading and configuring. And at some point I’ll have to delete the Ubuntu that I’m dual booting too. Fingers crossed that I get it right and don’t delete my Mac partition- I sadly can’t say I haven’t done that before. But hey, that’s what backups are for!