I bought a few used Dell Latitude laptops. Two are E6430 and two are E6530. All but one of these laptops are running Windows 7 Pro. These will be my first Linux computers. I want to install the latest LTS of Ubuntu as the only OS on the machines. I have been checking online and found some website information and videos that are sort of close to what I'm going to do except they either had another kind of BIOS or they were different Dell models (like Inspiron, XPS). The few Latitude videos I found that were closest just glossed over the necessary pre-installation BIOS settings and focused more on the actual installation setup. Funny, I would think that configuring Ubuntu by following the installation wizard is the easy part and pre-configuring the BIOS to allow the installation in the first place is the hard part. Whatever....
I want to know what parameters need to be changed in the BIOS. I know that my BIOS is set to Legacy now and I am guessing that I need to disable secure boot. Do I need to select UEFI or can I install using Legacy? Does it matter? Aside from changing the boot order are there any other BIOS changes needed? I've heard that older machines like these may not boot from a USB drive as easily as they would from a DVD drive.
Will the install Ubuntu option (first item in GRUB list) automatically format the drive or do I need to pre-format a partition. I don't want a dual boot Windows 7 laptop, only Ubuntu as the OS. Thanks very much for your help!!
