Re: Laptop choice, first boot issues

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To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 20:41:38 -0800

On Tuesday 23 November 2004 7:54 pm, Victor Munoz wrote:
> It will probably not be possible to buy a laptop without XP installed.

I believe CTL will sell you a laptop without an OS.
http://www.ctl.info/

> There's also the issue of the special "recovery" partition somewhere in the
> hard disk. And there's the issue of hardware detection.

Recovery partition is usually just to recover from suspend-to-disk, though I
understand Linux 2.6 has it's own facility for this.

> 1. If I naively do a normal boot, then filesystem conversion will take
> place, and I will not be able to (easily) resize partitions to make room for
> Linux later? Or the only problem with NTFS is that they're read-only?

I've resized NTFS partitions using parted.

> 2. If I keep XP, then I also have to keep the "recovery" partition. Right?

Not that I know of...

> 3. If I keep XP, what would be a suitable partition size for it? I will not
> really use it, just a backup in case I need to know about some hardware,
> until I'm sure sid is working properly with all hardware.

Well, the minimum requirements according to Microsoft's page about Win XP
Pro's system requirements[1] says that you need at least 1.5GB.
Realistically, if you can get what you need in a Windows system in 2GB,
you're a bigger geek than I.

> 4. A simpler alternative would be to boot first time with Knoppix, which
> seems to do a very good job detecting hardware. Learn all I have to learn
> with Knoppix, and then delete all partitions and start with a pure Debian
> system. Any horror stories out there?

That's usually how I check for smoothness: If Knoppix Just Works, Debian's
probably going to work.

> 5. This recovery partition, is of use only to Windows? The "delete all
> partitions" part above is safe if I intend to have Debian only?

AFAIK, yes. I accidentally killed the suspend partition on my laptop with no
ill effects.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/upgrading/sysreqs.mspx

-- 
Paul Johnson
baloo@ursine.dyndns.org
http://ursine.dyndns.org/

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