Linux

labp04

Hi all, I've become convinced (nearly :undecided ) to start to move to a Linux OS and have got myself a live cd of SimplyMEPIS 6.5 which is painfully slow when working off the cd drive. I'm thinking that I want to install it onto a second hard drive on my PC which tends to be used for documents and "secondary" programmes ie what I think of as non-critical and hopefully, once done, this will allow the system to work a lot faster.

My questions are: a) how do I back up the folders on the drive (:o ) is there a best way; and b) will it be necessary to partition the drive and if it is is there a best ie understandable way to do this.

Any thoughts'd be very welcome

backflip

I moved over to Linux about a month ago and love it. I think that ubuntu gutsy (7.10) is the distro you should try, by far the most popular and sooooo easy to use. Try the live cd first to check out if you like it and also how your hardware / wifi etc works. I shrunk my C drive and in the free space made 3 partitions for / (linux equivalent of C), a /home partition and a small swap partition, but Ubuntu will do that for you, I chose to do it manually. That was on my laptop, when I boot I get the choice of XP or Ubuntu.
On my desktop I used an external drive but first I disconnected my internal hd so now if I want ubuntu I switch on the external drive and it boots there, and if I want Vista I leave the external off. I had to change the bios so that it boots usb first then hd then cd drive.
I tried the ubuntu live cd for a while first. I was also quite lucky in that my internet/printer/scanner all worked, others are not so fortunate, but they do find a solution eventually.

wakandem

Ubuntu gutsy is the distro. Probably the easiest to learn, only in the fact that it is so popular it is easy to find solutions to difficulties.
https://www.ubuntuguide.org
If you have a spare drive then that is great. Get all the data off the drive either to the c: drive or to dvd. Linux can partition a drive with data as long as there is a large free space, so the progs may be ok, but be prepared to reinstall

Once sorted put in the distro and install. when the partition manager comes up then select mannual.
the secondry drive will probably come up as hda2 in linux. This can be partitioned however you likeYou need a min og 10 gig for linux as ex3 and then a swap partition of about 1.5 - 2 gig. The rest can be left for windows (ntfs). Linux does like at least 512mb ram. Ubuntu will automatically install grub which will give you the choice of os at boot up.
I had ubuntu going for about 6 months and it is great. Still use xp but not going to get vista, so going linux..

oldrimes

Completly agree with the other posters - Ubuntu is a great distribution to start with (https://www.ubuntu.com), and there is lots of help available through the ubuntu forums. Wired networking is straight forward, wireless networking especially with WPA encryption takes a bit more setting up - but lots of help and advice available online.

Conor_3

TBH, if you can't work out how to back up your documents, I think you're going to have a hell of a time with Linux. If you've got Windows on your PC and it's working, there's no need.

Do yourself a favour. Install something like VMWare/ Virtual PC etc, create a virtual PC and install Linux on that. That way you can see if you can get your head around it before installing it on your PC and potentially hosing it or creating a whole raft of new problems when you remove it after a week.

wolfman

Conor has a good point.

I too would go with Ubuntu. How well it works depends upon the make-up of your pc, hardware used within it etc...

For partitioning. You sound like you may still use Windows. Therefore I would go with:

1 - Windows XP (15gb)
2 - Ubuntu (5-10gb)
3 - SWAP (1gb)
4 - Home directory (the rest)

I'd also switch everything across to EXT3. Linux needs it for the install directory and the Home directory.

This doesn't become a problem with Windows. Just use an app called EXT2IFS. You can then read EXT3 partitions in Windows XP/Vista. It runs fine.

fwor

Like several others above, I moved to Linux recently, having used Windoze for many years. I also chose Ubuntu, and have not regretted it. It comes with a built-in partitioner and boot manager that is extremely well-behaved - i.e. unlike Windows, it won't trash every other OS on your hard drive when it installs!

To echo what Backflip says, probably the safest way is to dedicate one hard drive to XP and the other to Linux. For complete safety I tend to disconnect the drive with XP on it while installing Linux on the other, though this does mean that the boot manager does not automatically detect the XP drive and add it to the boot menu. You then need a bit of knowledge to edit /boot/grub/menu.list to fix that, but it's not difficult.

The above is not scare-mongering - while Ubuntu is very stable and compatible with a vast range of hardware, it's worth bearing in mind that you can quite easily trash a Linux install through inexperience (e.g. with one weeks experience I tried to resize a partition that the Logical Volume Manager was using, and that required a complete reformat and reinstall!).

If you have a spare PC then, as other have said, it may be easiest to experiment on that first. Set yourself a task (mine was to get a MythTV PVR running, which I did - eventually) so that you are forced to experiment and learn.

Good luck - I doubt you'll regret it, and keep in mind that you are far from being alone - there are some great forums and FAQs out there (e.g. the already mentioned and fantastic www.ubuntuguide.org) to help you along the way.

epz_2

fwor wrote: »

The above is not scare-mongering - while Ubuntu is very stable and compatible with a vast range of hardware, it's worth bearing in mind that you can quite easily trash a Linux install through inexperience

or stupidity, i once put gentoo on the wrong disk, whats worse it was before the kernel started treating ide drives as scsi so i was fdisking /dev/hda grrr.

as much as it pains me to admit given the amount of time ive spent on gentoo unbunto or better yet kubunto is probably the best desktop user option for standard stuff.

the main thing you need to rememeber with linux is you can pretty much do anything on it, the hardest bit is figuring out the names of programs that do what you are used to on windows

spud17

Don't rule out PCLOS, this my favourite.
I used it as my first "proper" Linux, then along came Ubuntu 7.10.
Everyone was raving about it so I tried it. It was fine for a while, then the other day after I hadn't used it for about a week I had a mass of updates to download.
It froze half way through and never really recovered, becoming unstable in that it would suddenly reboot or shut down.

So I've just reinstalled PCLOS.

I'm still a complete newbie with Linux but this is what I did originally.

I got hold of an old 10gb hard drive and let it install using the whole disk then played about partitioning.

Good advice by the way about disconnecting you main HD if you are not too confident.
The problem is you then have to edit the bootloader if you want to run Windows alongside Linux.
Practice installing as I suggest, PCLOS installs in minutes not hours like XP.
Set your Windows hard drive as Slave (this ensures that the computer boots from the Linux bootloader) reconnect everything.
Reinstall your chosen distro and the bootloader will detect Windows and act accordingly, on booting you will have a choice of OS.

You then need a bit of knowledge to edit /boot/grub/menu.list to fix that, but it's not difficult.

If you use PCLOS then you browse to the boot window (the same as you move around in XP), highlight what needs changing /click edit/put tick in box, and you've altered the default boot.
Much easier than Ubuntu in my opinion.

bookduck

I'm with Conor, but an easier and more expensive way - if your MB supports booting from usb, is an external usb drive (buy the box and drive separate). I'd avoid the virtual server from microsoft though, as it is a bad seller for reliability/compatibility reasons, forcing people to products like Vmware.

I'm going to give away my old laptop, but did not want to give the person XP, because he is computer illiterate, laptop is too old, 256 meg mem and 6gb hdd 450MHz processor.

The use is for music editing. My friend presents music quizes - 10 seconds of a tune etc.

Tried Kubuntu 7.10 (linux should stop his friends from fiddling !). Found that the touchpad was very sensitive, but the real problem is that it did not detect the PS2 mouse (known problem in the ubuntu forum). Also it was quite a bit slower than the old NT4 software on it. A few of the standard programs included on the disk crash too - very unipressed with it all!!!

Ended up going to PCBSD last night. It is much faster and similar to install, just works. Now to install the apps and get them working...