Linux???

[usmc1]

I've completed my HD upgrade, from 10 gig to 160 gig, with only minor, stupid, unthinking little glitch. I've run off the new drive for several months and things are fine. No more hangups, slightly quicker, etc. It was worth the $ and a good learning experience, plus everyone here was helpful and very patient with my liberal education, non-tech, dumbass.

I am toying with the notion of wiping clean the old 10-gig drive and installing Linux on it. Boot drive then would still be WinXP with MS based software. But, the other drive would be Linux with Linux based software. The effect would be two separate OS on two separate HDs in the same computer.

Is this feasible? Would 10-gig be sufficient? Is it something that a home computer type person could do? Would I be creating unnecessary problems and conflicts for myself?

If it is feasible, where would my starting point be? What would I need first to study and read and ask a gazillion questions before getting started?

[rone]

Research UBUNTU. Should work great in 10GB.

I've completed my HD upgrade, from 10 gig to 160 gig, with only minor, stupid, unthinking little glitch. I've run off the new drive for several months and things are fine. No more hangups, slightly quicker, etc. It was worth the $ and a good learning experience, plus everyone here was helpful and very patient with my liberal education, non-tech, dumbass.

I am toying with the notion of wiping clean the old 10-gig drive and installing Linux on it. Boot drive then would still be WinXP with MS based software. But, the other drive would be Linux with Linux based software. The effect would be two separate OS on two separate HDs in the same computer.

Is this feasible? Would 10-gig be sufficient? Is it something that a home computer type person could do? Would I be creating unnecessary problems and conflicts for myself?

If it is feasible, where would my starting point be? What would I need first to study and read and ask a gazillion questions before getting started?

[harveym]

Yes - 10 gig would be enough. I ran my machine with a triple boot to XP, Linux and Solaris. I used the Solaris boot manager as I liked it best, but you can use either Linux (I had Red Hat) or Windoze boot managers.

When I retired my old machine I moved the Linux and Solaris systems to my old PC with a 40 gig drive, 10 of them to Linux, and Use my new machine with XP on a 120 gig drive. Only did this as I used the new one for work.

By the way, I never used MS Office. I download OpenOffice and run it on all my systems. No problem with compatibility across systems and I can create and view documents, spreadsheets, presentations in MS Office format.

[nudenwv]

just testing out to see if i can post.

[Centauri4]

USMC1, did you try Linux on the 10 Gb drive?

There are some Linux installations that can easily fit in 1 Gb or 2 Gb, so a drive that small is not a problem.

There are development contests to install Linux on smaller and smaller devices, and the smallest of them is a (special purpose) single-board computer (SBC) that is about as large as a pack of cigarettes. The computer is so small it can run on two double A batteries, I think.

For the unfamiliar in the audience, the heart of Linux is called the "Kernel" and I think Microsoft Windows XP has a Kernel also, it just is not referred to that way as often.

The computer I am writing this post on now has Freespire Linux installed and it featured something called "Click-N-Run" or "CNR" to install additional programs from an online repository created by the company releasing this version. The CNR worked very well until being turned off recently.

Freespire offers a new and improved version based on the Ubuntu Linux Kernel and based on the quality of the earlier effort, I would wholeheartedly recommend checking it out. The installation of Freespire from a bootable .ISO image CD-ROM I created myself was completely painless and the built-in Firefox browser does a respectable job of displaying Internet content.

Of the 37.3 Gb of space on my hard drive after over a year using the computer I still have 33.7 Gb of space free. The 512 Mb of RAM installed shows 81 processes running and 508 Mb of memory currently used. So Freespire is doing a good job of managing 3 open Firefox windows (2 with YouTube videos cached and half-way played), a "My Computer" type window open browsing hard drive content and a Command Prompt window open showing me a list of running processes (similar to Windows "Task Manager").

~

[SilentJ]

Not related to USMC1's post, but I just had my first linux crash after 4+ years of running it on 2 machines. My web server / ftp server / tivo, which only gets rebooted about 4 times per year, actually locked up solid yesterday. I couldn't even ssh into it from my other machine, I had to do a hard reset.

Both machines are running Fedora 7, but the non-server is dual-booted with WinXP.

[Codewize]

I don't think you can have a machine with 2 partitions marked as active.

[SilentJ]

I don't think you can have a machine with 2 partitions marked as active.

If you are referring to my post, the dual-boot means that at startup I have the option of booting to WinXP or to Linux. It doesn't mean both are running simultaneously.

[Codewize]

OK Understood. In that case I recommend using the Linux boot loader, of which ever flavor you're running. I've found in the past that Windows boot loaders don't like the EXT file systems for whatever reason. I guess they assume you're going to boot 2 different versions of Windows or something.

[baardenkalebe]

Now you can install Ubuntu under Windows like any other program.
You get the bootloader from Windows when you start up your computer.
Uninstalling works the same way as any other program you have installed under Windows.
It's easier because you don't have to mess with drives and so.
But they say it works a bit slower.

[baardenkalebe]

Ran in to this today.
What if the Matrix Ran on Windows?
Just wait until the end.

http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2008/11/10/the-matrix-runs-on-windows/

[SilentJ]

Now you can install Ubuntu under Windows like any other program.
You get the bootloader from Windows when you start up your computer.
Uninstalling works the same way as any other program you have installed under Windows.
It's easier because you don't have to mess with drives and so.
But they say it works a bit slower.

It didn't realize you could do that with Ubuntu. I recently switched from Fedora to Ubuntu. I wouldn't have considered installing it within Windows because I already have my hard drive partitioned and I want the extra speed of running it on its own. But, that helps Linux get its foot a little farther in the door if Windows users can try it with messing with their drive.

[KW]

I'm not sure how much you play around with the various distributions, but have you tried a bootable Linux CD. I keep copies of Knoppix around for occasions when I need to use Linux and don't want to install the whole package.

It can be downloaded at http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/ for free, and it's quite handy to have on hand.

[Naturist Mark]

Speaking of Linux distros ... Google's Chrome OS will be based on Linux. Although hyped as a "Windows Killer (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html)", it is aimed at netbooks - smaller machines designed to do little more than run a browser - but the browser runs web apps that can do most of the work that Windows applications run on larger machines.

Of course you can do that now, many netbooks come with Linux and Firefox installed, Or a faster stripped down Windows (I have an Acer netbook that runs on an XP version that boots in about 10 seconds, or resumes in about 1 second).

Another interesting idea is the "Computer-on-a-stick", which is a secure personal desktop environment, complete with all of your applications and work files (or front end for them if they are web based) on a USB flashdrive. Just plug them into any compatible computer and you get your desktop and can start working where ever you left off. Some run as Windows applications - which makes startup simpler and lets the host computer provide full peripheral support for printers and such, and others supply a complete OS (usually a Linux flavor) for almost complete isolation from the host - there is even one company selling a Computer-on-a-stick with a biometric fingerprint reader on the drive.

[Mun]

Has anyone tried gOS Linux (http://www.thinkgos.com) which is sort of like Mac. And it seems the idea of ChromeOS by Google is loosely based on gOS Cloud which is a browser based OS that one can try out today over even Windows.

[Centauri4]

It didn't realize you could do that with Ubuntu. I recently switched from Fedora to Ubuntu. I wouldn't have considered installing it within Windows because I already have my hard drive partitioned and I want the extra speed of running it on its own. But, that helps Linux get its foot a little farther in the door if Windows users can try it with messing with their drive.

The "BeOS" operating system (now Defunct) was capable of being installed on a Microsoft Windows formatted partition and it installed itself in a single, large file (approx. ~200-500 MB) and ran from that disk space. I owned several copies of it (versions 4.5 and 5.0) and even brought a small amount of stock in the company. Its graphics rending capability were far superior to anything else available at the time, and this was my first introduction to a Linux-like operating system that included the TCP/IP network stack in its "core" rather than treating it as an 'Add/Remove Programs' piece that could be removed and reinstalled. I suppose Microsoft made their TCP/IP that way so machines could be configured as "stand alone", non-networked machines, but having a removable network stack never made much sense to me otherwise.

BeOS was a "media OS" intended to handle multiple tasks running concurrently in real-time (as far as I recall). It had little or no perceptible degradation in performance when you had a 3D object rotating in one window, music playing in another and were also surfing the Internet! It was very cool!

I first installed BeOS on a Dell Dimension, Pentium II with like 1 GB of memory (if that, it may have been 512 MB!). The left-overs of the Be, Inc. company were sold to Palm, Inc. and that was the end of the venture. Palm was rumoured to be interested in some of their technology for its hand-held Palm Pilots, but alas nothing ever came of it that I know of.

I will be checking out Google's "Chrome OS" sometime soon.

~

[William_InTheBuff]

I use Ubuntu, with VirtualBox, this means I have Ubuntu running as the main OS then I can boot windows machines or more linux machines, without having to actually reboot - ie. you can still surf / email on you normal machine, while trying out other things on other machines. 10gb is certainly enough for the "host" machine and 2 to 3 virtual boxes.

Best of all Linux is robust and flexible.