Installing Lubuntu 12.04 on a Samsung Series 9 Laptop

I recently reformatted my system for the first time since I originally installed Ubuntu 11.04 on it, and I want to document some of the “gotchas” I encountered. I unnecessarily lost a few hours to trial-and-error, and I hope to spare you the same frustration.

For this rebuild, I personally installed Lubuntu (with an “L”) 12.04, because I hate Unity, and because gnome-panel shares too many of Unity’s constraints (like only supporting four workspaces) to be useful. With that said, I’d imagine that the following advice applies to some of the other *buntus as well.

This was the process I used to install Lubuntu 12.04 on a clean system:

Installing Ubuntu on a Samsung Series 9 Laptop

Earlier this week, my trusty Toshiba Satellite died after five years of faithful service. I decided to go with the new Samsung Series 9 Laptop as its successor, with the intention of configuring the system to dual-boot into Ubuntu and Windows 7. I encountered a few brutal gotchas during the installation process, so I figured I’d document them here. (To the best of my Googling, there’s not a lot of information out there on the net as of today.)

What follows is what I believe to be the shortest path to a clean installation. It is not the path that I took. Therefore, if you find that anything does not work as described, please let me know.