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.

Originally Posted by 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?

[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]

Originally Posted by Codewize

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.