Some basic Linux questions--and kind of Windows

[Cerb]

1. For quicker swapping between them, is there a hibernate-like feature for Linux? If so, are there more than one, and are any separate from desktop environments, OR useable without them (I won't be using KDE or Gnome if I can help it)?

2.Since I have Win2k, and the disk isn't SP3, I'll likely want to reformat in another computer. Which do you guys think would be best?
[*]32GB FAT32 shared partition--get rid of size limit (160GB), and have a nice shared space.
[*]Format mostly NTFS in another PC, and trust the abilities of a recent Debian distro (It'll either be Ubuntu or Xandros OC) to handle it. No fie system compression or encryption will be used.
[*]32GB FAT32 partition, from another compauter, for Windows to use for system files and user folders.
[*]And/or: Is there a way to get Windows 2000 to use a different drive from the system drive for the Documents and Settings folders? If so, that could be put on a shared partition, and Windows could still have a big NTFS space, but no worries about reading and writing between OSes.

3. Google has not been kind here, despite that I thought it would. Where are some good resources for desktop GUI configuration? Mixing up window managers and desktop environments, widget-like apps, etc.?

 

[TonyRic]

swsusp will hibernate linux no problem and it is in the latest 2.6 series kernel, with the caveat that you are not running an SMP kernel)

Personally I wouldn't trust any OS to write to NTFS other than windows. My suggestion would be this:

Get the windows ext2 drivers for windows and use that as the shared partition. Have one boot in ntfs for windows, then create your shared partition as ext2, then install linux into it's own space.

 

[Nothinman]

swsusp will hibernate linux no problem and it is in the latest 2.6 series kernel, with the caveat that you are not running an SMP kernel)

Or using a SCSI disk and it takes a bit of prodding to figure out which modules need unloaded before the suspend/resume cycle will work. I'm not knocking it, I use swsusp2 on my notebook daily, but it can be a bit of work to get going.

# Format mostly NTFS in another PC, and trust the abilities of a recent Debian distro (It'll either be Ubuntu or Xandros OC) to handle it. No fie system compression or encryption will be used.

The distribution is irrelevant, you'll need to try CaptiveNTFS to even think about writing to the filesystem and then you're using the MS NTFS.sys driver inside of Linux, not something I would feel good about doing.

And/or: Is there a way to get Windows 2000 to use a different drive from the system drive for the Documents and Settings folders? If so, that could be put on a shared partition, and Windows could still have a big NTFS space, but no worries about reading and writing between OSes.

Sure you can do that, MS makes it a bit of a pain but it's doable.

 

[nweaver]

last time I tried (about 9 months iirc) the ext2/3 driver for windows was read only.

 

[Nothinman]

last time I tried (about 9 months iirc) the ext2/3 driver for windows was read only.

AFAIK the ext2 portion writes ok, but it's not very reliable with ext3.

 

[Cerb]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

last time I tried (about 9 months iirc) the ext2/3 driver for windows was read only.

AFAIK the ext2 portion writes ok, but it's not very reliable with ext3.

Can't a ext3 be used at a ext2? Or does it need to stay ext2 for Windows?

Thanks so far, guys.

 

[Nothinman]

Can't a ext3 be used at a ext2? Or does it need to stay ext2 for Windows?

In Linux they're 99% interchangable. You can mount ext3 and ext2 and just lose the journal, but I'm not sure the same is true of the Windows drivers since I'm sure they're less mature.

But you don't want to write to the Linux filesystem while Linux is suspended anyway, it'll wake up and find the filesystem in an inconsistent state and possibly crash. If you're going to hibernate Linux and use one of the filesystems under Windows you'll need to umount the filesystem from Linux first. The same goes for Windows.

 

[Cerb]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Can't a ext3 be used at a ext2? Or does it need to stay ext2 for Windows?

In Linux they're 99% interchangable. You can mount ext3 and ext2 and just lose the journal, but I'm not sure the same is true of the Windows drivers since I'm sure they're less mature.

But you don't want to write to the Linux filesystem while Linux is suspended anyway, it'll wake up and find the filesystem in an inconsistent state and possibly crash. If you're going to hibernate Linux and use one of the filesystems under Windows you'll need to umount the filesystem from Linux first. The same goes for Windows.

Well, if I were to do it this way, I'd try for an independent partition, much like the FAT32--except I'd make it along the lines of 100+GB or so ext2 (3?) for shared stuff, giving each actual OS a reasonably small (4-8GB) space to rest on. With so much of what I use being small files, a large FAT32 partition would eat space up too fast (Litestep alone is currently over twice the disk space compared to space used--under FAT32 at 32GB, that would be over 4x)

So, would that mean I'd need to make unmounting as part of a script for the 'hibernation'? AFAIK, Windows should be fine, and usually only gives minor complaints (dialog boxes) if a restored app or explorer window comes up that is no longer there or modified.

 

[Nothinman]

So, would that mean I'd need to make unmounting as part of a script for the 'hibernation'? AFAIK, Windows should be fine, and usually only gives minor complaints (dialog boxes) if a restored app or explorer window comes up that is no longer there or modified.

Yea, there's a hibernation script (the package is called hibernate in Debian) that is really easy to extend, you can have it umount on suspend and mount on restore if you want. As for Windows, I've had it get extremely confused when I modified a FAT partition while it was hibernated, it essentially disguarded all of the changes.

 

[Cerb]

Well, maybe I'll make more than one ext2 partition, one just for data, as long as they don't need to be primary partitions--being able to modify the partitions between boots is kind of the point .

Having all data (DVDs are cheap--why worry about what's important and not? ) backed up, I can afford to play around, as long as the Windows install as a whole does not blow up to an unrepairable state.