Re: completely new to home Linux

Walter Mautner wrote:
k wallace wrote:


Hi all,
I have experience with Unix and Linux (red hat) at work, but would like
to install a dual-boot option on my new home system. I have a disk copy
of Ubuntu, i'm just now formatting my new hard drive.


You already have windows on another (first) drive?


I don't know *squat* about this; completely learning as I go along.

What I want-
a system capable of doing everything I do at home with XP Pro, yet with
the freedom and flexibility of Linux. I'm not much of a MS fan, to tell
the truth.


Linux is not windows. You will find toys for almost everything, but you
probably have to fit them together by yourself.


I need all the usual; web access through my wireless G and/or


Depends upon the wireless chipset. Some are supported natively, some need
ndiswrapper to run the windows drivers.


ethernet card/cablemodem, SSH tunnel to work and back, Star Office or


ssh and sshd are fine, Openoffice does a excellent job too. You can set it
to save in microsoft formats by default, but it can as well save as pdf.


openoffice complete utility. I regularly run fairly heavy
numbercrunching programs and 3D modeling programs, my new system's
running an AMD 64, 250 GB Seagate HD, within a few months will be
running raid 0 on another 250 GB hd.


These programs may need emulation (wine, qemu, vmplayer, crossover, win4lin,
vmware) or you have to glue together a new toolchain.


questions:
how much partition space do I allocate to each OS?


Depends. XP wants 8 GB, linux about the same, for operating system
partition. It is a good idea to have a 2nd "data" partition for XP as well (move "My
documents" there).
Linux should run fine with a "root" partition, swap (at least the size of
ram) and a /home (for the same reasons as XP, to survive reinstalls since
you want to try different distributions).


How to I prompt the system to invite me to select which OS i want to
use? I'm not the only user on the home box, but i am the only one who'll
be using Linux.


Each mainstream distribution has grub or lilo and will add pre-existing
windows partitions as well.


For the record, i'm more hardware savvy than software savvy, which is
probably obvious from my questions; as a mechanical engineer, I
generally just let software 'do its thing' and tweak my hardware, but I
am interested in this move to Linux.


You will have to learn how to tweak some software configurations to get the
best out of linux. Google will be your friend, especially the groups archive.


You are absolutely doing the right thing starting out with a dual boot.
Too many people jump right in and dump Windows before they know what they're doing. Here's my five cents worth:

x86 systems have a max of four primary and extended partitions(per system, not per drive). Linux likes at least three (/boot, /, and /swap), Windows can live on one partition. I recommend 20 GB for Linux for starters and the rest of your drive for Windows. If you have data that you want to use with both OS's, format your Windows partition as FAT32 (which Linux will recognize as VFAT), otherwise it can be NTFS (which is problematic at best under Linux).

As said above, I allocate 20 GB of my hard drive to Linux, and set up three partitions in it: 200 MB to /boot; twice the amount of RAM I have to /swap, and the rest to / (root). I recommend the EXT3 filesystem for starters (which is a journaled FS like NTFS). On my system I have two hard drives, 40 GB and 80 GB. both configured with
a primary and an extended partition under Windows (which is the full four primary partition allotment for my system). The three Linux partions exist as logical drives in 20 GB of the 40 GB drive. Other logical partitions on both drives hold various logical drives that I have for Windows (all the way up to N:/, including one for Windows swap (also allocated as twice my RAM, but totally separate from the Linux swap). (The Linux distro I use on this system is CentOS 4.2, on my other system I have FC4).

While a newbie, I suggest you configure GRUB or LILO to boot Windows by default.

When Linux is running, you can confirm your disk allocations in the /etc/fstab file.
.

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