Used Windows all my life

[corpseofworms]

Mmmmkay. So I can do most things in windows (with an exception dicussed in a second) and I am ready to give Linux a try. A friend of mine gave me two installation CDs for Ubuntu, one for intel and one for AMD (64-bit? not sure), and a live CD. I tried the live CD and liked it, but it took forever to load on my system (its not an old one).

Given the above situation, and the fact that I'm going to school soon and am trying to reduce the amount of CDs I want to take with me, the only natural solution is to set up a Linux partition on my hard drive. Can you guys walk me through that? Also, how big do you think the partition should be? I'll be using it for just about everything on my system that isn't gaming (which doesn't add up to much).

Thanks in advance.

 

[bersl2]

I tried the live CD and liked it, but it took forever to load on my system

That's probably because it loaded software directly from the CD instead of from a ramdisk.

 

[drag]

Generally for performance:

1. The more ram the better, Linux is efficient at using it.
2. Avoid ATI products. Don't use their motherboards, don't use their video cards
2. use Nvidia video cards. (generally avoid their motherboard chipsets if you can)
3. Don't use cheap SATA raid products. Unless you have a 'real' RAID controller (these things don't cost less then a 150 and don't ever come integrated on consumer or 'enthusiast' motherboards) Linux software RAID is much superior. Cheap RAID 0/1 generally make nice device controllers though, just don't ever use the raid features.

For disk space you probably want 21 gigs. 10 gigs for programs. 10 gigs for user space. 1 gig for swap partition.

It's much different then Windows.

For best results when buying hardware buy specific hardware with good free drivers and support for Linux developers from the actual manufacturer.

A Audigy or sound blaster card is cheap and much better then any onboard sound card for Linux. Better then any nforce onboard, for instance.

 

[corpseofworms]

Well, I have a gig of RAM, that should be enough. I will mostly use Linux just for homework, surfing the net, and experimenting with a different OS.

I have a 6600gt, but also an nforce 4. Although I am not going to game with Linux.

I don't even have a SATA hard drive

I'll use 22 gb, I heard you're supposed to use 2Xyour RAM for swap partition.

But I just need help setting up a partition, not with Linux itself.

 

[drag]

It doesn't make much sense with a gig of RAM. Once you start using over 512megs of your swap partition as RAM then your system is realy going to be very very slow. You'll start killing proccesses or reboot or something before you fill it up. But it doesn't hurt to have 2 gigs.


With the partitioning in Linux it's usually easy. It depends on the distro, they generally make it easy to do the partitions in the installer. But generally you only need 2 partitions. One for root, make that the 20 gig, and one partition for swap, 2 gigs. That's all you need. People make more depending on different situations, but its for convienience more then need.

 

[The Pentium Guy]

Graphical eh? I'm more of a Console oriented type. You can download the 100MB (i think) Debian distro, it pwns!

 

[corpseofworms]

So the installer will walk me through the partitioning? And what can I expect running a system with two OS's? Will it give me an option of which to go into on boot?

 

[JeffBlair]

Here is one way that you can resize the partitions:

Get knoppix
burn it to a CD as an ISO image using Nero or what ever program.
Boot off of the CD
Right click on the hd that you want to change.... i.e. /dev/hda1
Bring up a command prompt
type in qtparted
That will bring up a window, and you can resize all you want.
Save the changes, and reboot with the Linux Live CD and install

As for the partitions in Linux, I would keep it simple, and do it like this:

/boot 50 meg
swap 512 meg
/ rest of space

With 1 gig of real memory, you don't need a huge amount of swap space.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Lol i ordered an Ubuntu disk back in March. Just mailed out June 30. I'm still waiting for it to arrive. lol I WANT UBUNTU!

 

[TGS]

Partition recommendations

 

[bersl2]

I would recommend making a /home partition. This way, if you ever FUBAR anything so bad that you need to reinstall, all your data will go untouched. However, the down side of this, as with all partitioning layouts, is that it's inconvenient to change their size. QTparted does a good job of tying parted and the resizers for each file system together though.

 

[P0ldy]

Originally posted by: corpseofworms
And what can I expect running a system with two OS's?

You can expect to neglect one of them heavily. And it'll probably be Linux.

Yes, you'll be prompted which to boot on power on. And the partitioning will be GUI-based on nearly all popular distros except Gentoo.

 

[TGS]

I'm on a mis-reading roll as of late.

As for GUI vs non-gui partitioning. I preferred to run the non-gui, so I know what the GUI partitioner is doing at the disk level. I'm geeky like that though...