Go Back   Cyber Tech Help Support Forums > Operating Systems > Linux

Notices

Linux Problem solving for all open source distributions of Linux, such as Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat, Suse, Mandriva and other proprietary unixes such as Solaris, SGI Irix. Newbie friendly too!

Reply
 
Topic Tools
  #1  
Old May 22nd, 2006, 07:51 PM
Slogan's Avatar
Slogan Slogan is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
O/S: Windows XP Pro
Posts: 130
A Few Linux Questions

Hello,

I run XP but was thinking of giving Linux a go, after hearing such good things about it.

- I'm aware there are many distributions available and this is my first stumbling block - which one is the best or offers the most 'stuff'? I've heard of RedHat a lot but bar that, I know little else.

- I'm aiming to run a dual boot system. This question isn't so much how to perform this (as I'm sure the question has been asked a million times before) as opposed to wondering if Linux requires a totally clean slate for which to install? I have two 80 gig drives and the primary holds XP and most of my applications and pictures, music, videos etc... - Then on the slave drive I have about 20 gigs worth of games - would it be possible to add Linux to this hard drive as it is, or would I need to :

a) Partition a section on the slave, for Linux

or

b) Transfer all the folders from the slave drive to the primary

- And finally, how hard is it to set up? I'm by no means an expert at coding and all of that kind of stuff - but I thought I would give this a go, more so for fun and/or learning purposes than anything else.

Thanks for any help.
Reply With Quote
  #2  
Old May 22nd, 2006, 07:58 PM
renegade600's Avatar
renegade600 renegade600 is offline
CTH Subscriber
 
Join Date: Sep 2003
O/S: Linux
Location: Osceola, Ar
Posts: 26,675
which offers the most, check out suse linux - its one of the most popular.

I would suggest backing up anything you cannot afford to lose in your xp no matter what version of linux you use. sometimes there can be problems.
Reply With Quote
  #3  
Old May 22nd, 2006, 09:23 PM
Slogan's Avatar
Slogan Slogan is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
O/S: Windows XP Pro
Posts: 130
Cheers, renegade.

How do things work in regards to applications. For example, will my home internet network still work in Linux and will my games work etc..?
Reply With Quote
  #4  
Old May 23rd, 2006, 05:57 PM
Slogan's Avatar
Slogan Slogan is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
O/S: Windows XP Pro
Posts: 130
Furthermore, how the hell do you download a FULL version of Linux?

I keep seeing what looks to be like bits and pieces of a Linux distribution that I have to piece together myself in some sort of brilliant jig-saw.
Reply With Quote
  #5  
Old May 23rd, 2006, 06:16 PM
JoeC0180 JoeC0180 is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
O/S: Linux
Location: Columbus, Ohio
Posts: 227
Quote:
Originally Posted by Slogan
How do things work in regards to applications. For example, will my home internet network still work in Linux and will my games work etc..?
You should still be able to setup linux on your home network. Most games are made for windows and wont run on linux. You can use something like 'wine' to try to get your windows games to run on linux but even that wont run them all.

Quote:
Furthermore, how the hell do you download a FULL version of Linux?

I keep seeing what looks to be like bits and pieces of a Linux distribution that I have to piece together myself in some sort of brilliant jig-saw.
You should be able to download the full verion from the distros website...
http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org - you can download suse from this site

A few others you might want to look at...
http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://www.mepis.org/

These three distros are all pretty good to start with. Also take a look at www.distrowatch.com
Reply With Quote
  #6  
Old May 23rd, 2006, 06:28 PM
kage's Avatar
kage kage is offline
CTH Subscriber
 
Join Date: Apr 2004
O/S: Linux
Posts: 1,644
Slogan, the linux installation cd's/dvd can be downloaded as a '.iso' image. For example, here you can download the 5-cd iso set to install OpenSuSe, or you can download the single DVD iso image. Either way, you burn the iso to disk, and will boot from the first cd in the series or the dvd, depending on which set you use. There is also an ftp-installation disk you can use, it is a single cd that installs the system over ftp/http after booting the live-cd installer.

Another option if you choose not to use SuSe is Ubuntu. The mirror page is located here. After choosing a mirror you will see a page like this, where you will want to choose the install cd for your architecture. The iso image will download, and as with SuSe you will need to burn it to a disk and boot from it. Unlike SuSe, Ubuntu is a single-cd install only, all the packages are installed after the system is installed and booted for the first time via the apt package manager.

For informtion on how to burn a .iso image correctly, see this page.
Reply With Quote
  #7  
Old May 23rd, 2006, 06:35 PM
Slogan's Avatar
Slogan Slogan is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
O/S: Windows XP Pro
Posts: 130
Cheers both Kage and Joe.

In regards to these option under downloads, does it matter which row I choose?

ppc
x86-64
x86

Can't for the life of me figure out what they represent - no doubt something easy and totally obvious.
Reply With Quote
  #8  
Old May 23rd, 2006, 08:45 PM
JoeC0180 JoeC0180 is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
O/S: Linux
Location: Columbus, Ohio
Posts: 227
Most likely you should choose the x86 version

ppc is for apple computers

x86-64 is for 64-bit cpu's
Reply With Quote
  #9  
Old May 24th, 2006, 08:38 AM
DaveQB DaveQB is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
O/S: Linux
Location: Sydney
Age: 46
Posts: 318
As for partitioning:
If is easy enough, i would clear out your 2nd 80gig and partition while installing your distro of choice on it. That way you can have a large chunk of it (say the last 60gigs) in FAT32 (VFAT) so that both Windows and Linux can read and write to it.

You can leave your disks as is and re-partition the 2nd 80 gig with either 1) Mandriva's installers offers a partition re-sizer or, 2) use a seperate product like Gparted liveCD (with its list of features here or a comercial product like Partition Magic.

My vote for Distro would be either Kubuntu or Mandriva (KDE all the way ;-) )
Reply With Quote
  #10  
Old May 24th, 2006, 04:23 PM
Slogan's Avatar
Slogan Slogan is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
O/S: Windows XP Pro
Posts: 130
Cheers gentlemen.

I eventually got it downloaded this morning around 6am - a computer on all night job but worth it, hopefully.

My main drive at the moment is NTFS - is it possible to run to run the master drive as NTFS and the slave as FAT32? I assume it's perfectly possible - but not sure if it'll lead to any complications having two different types of drive on the system.

Furthermore and this is where my inexperience will shine through (like it hasn't already) - What sort of practical software must I get for Linux? I assume I'm going to need the regular firewall/virus scanner and spyware stuff?
Reply With Quote
  #11  
Old May 24th, 2006, 04:40 PM
DaveQB DaveQB is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
O/S: Linux
Location: Sydney
Age: 46
Posts: 318
Quote:
Originally Posted by Slogan
Cheers gentlemen.

I eventually got it downloaded this morning around 6am - a computer on all night job but worth it, hopefully.

My main drive at the moment is NTFS - is it possible to run to run the master drive as NTFS and the slave as FAT32? I assume it's perfectly possible - but not sure if it'll lead to any complications having two different types of drive on the system.
No thats fine. You will have ext3 partitions for your '/' and '/home' partitions.

So I would go for the 2nd 80gig:

/ = 10gig ext3, swap = 1gig swap, /home = 10gig ext3 and /storage = 59gig VFAT.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Slogan
Furthermore and this is where my inexperience will shine through (like it hasn't already) - What sort of practical software must I get for Linux? I assume I'm going to need the regular firewall/virus scanner and spyware stuff?
No, no need for that. Linux doesn't have these vulnerabilities. I think there's only been 5 or so viruses for Linux and non of which are in the wild, have any impact non on modern kernels.

The Linux kernal hasa built in firewall. I would get 'Firestarter" to use to control the firewall rules you might need. Is this system connecting direct to the net or behind a network ?? If the later, then no need to have any firewall rules in place anyway.
Reply With Quote
  #12  
Old May 25th, 2006, 12:58 AM
Slogan's Avatar
Slogan Slogan is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
O/S: Windows XP Pro
Posts: 130
Cheers once again, Dave. Greatly appreciated.

Should the partitions be primary or logical - or varied?

Last edited by Slogan; May 25th, 2006 at 01:03 AM.
Reply With Quote
  #13  
Old May 25th, 2006, 01:54 AM
DaveQB DaveQB is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
O/S: Linux
Location: Sydney
Age: 46
Posts: 318
No worries.

Ok, good question.
As long as the boot partition is primary, the rest is ok as extended.
So we can have:

hda1 = primary , /
hda2 = extended
hda5 = extended-logical , swap
hda6 = extended-logical , /home

Alot of my systems are like that.
This is fine also:

hda1 = primary , /
hda2 = primary , /home
hda3 = extended
hda5 = extended-logical , swap

Or you could do like Red Hat

hda1 = primary , /boot
hda2 = primary , /
hda3 = extended
hda5 = extended-logical , swap
hda6 = extended-logical , /home



I think you get the idea.
Reply With Quote
  #14  
Old May 25th, 2006, 03:22 AM
Slogan's Avatar
Slogan Slogan is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
O/S: Windows XP Pro
Posts: 130
I got the dvd to boot, which I was quite pleased about...

Specified settings and such just to see how far I could get before doing any damage - things seem to working well.

However, where do you specify where the OS installs into - all I can remember is something about shrink Windows ...or something. I haven't partitioned the second hard drive yet - because I can't find a tool to do so...PartitionMagic demo lets you see what it does - but doesn't actually do anything and Partition Logic just didn't work...
Reply With Quote
  #15  
Old May 25th, 2006, 05:55 PM
DaveQB DaveQB is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
O/S: Linux
Location: Sydney
Age: 46
Posts: 318
Quote:
Originally Posted by DaveQB
You can leave your disks as is and re-partition the 2nd 80 gig with either 1) Mandriva's installers offers a partition re-sizer or, 2) use a seperate product like Gparted liveCD (with its list of features here

Thats my choice.

Where you have the Shrink Windows option, you should be able to choose manual or advanced.
Reply With Quote
Reply

Bookmarks

Topic Tools

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump

Similar Topics
Topic Topic Starter Forum Replies Last Post
I have some questions to ask about Linux. rynprov Linux 10 March 8th, 2008 07:57 PM
A Few Linux Questions SkullandBones Linux 4 January 26th, 2008 04:22 PM
3 Linux Questions (Ubuntu) mugsy27 Linux 2 August 1st, 2007 12:30 AM
Linux 64Bit Questions nikor001 Linux 1 April 3rd, 2007 10:01 PM


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 08:23 PM.