the minor details needed for even easy distros
CrashOveride said:
wow! i need to read up a bit... most of that dosnt make much sence... i think i might DL them both (they are Both free and DL able right?) this weeekend since i have access to cable it think... so i lemme get this straigh... i should make ~10GB of unpartionted (i have the space) and then us e another thing to partition that into Lunix usable space.. then have another partioitn that is really big for file sharing? oh and whzt kinda stuff will i prolly use Lunix for? jsut web browsing stuff? dose it suppost many games?
Free some gb of space
Boot off the cd you made for the distro
Partition about 100mb for the /boot partition. I recommend ext3 filesystem. Make a swap partition. This is just like windows swap file and its actually a partition of unpartitioned space, designated for swap. You probably only need 200-400 mb. The rest is for your root partition where the operating system and programs and files go. This is usually ext3 although if your distro supports it you could also use reiserfs. If you're dual booting with windows, and windows is NTFS, you may want to make a seperate vfat (FAT32) partition for sharing between them. I usually call my vfat partition /data and make it 4-7gb, and my root partition about the same or slightly larger. But it depends on what you want to share between them.
You'll be given a choiuce of boot loaders- LILO or GRUB or you can make a bootdisk and boot from a floppy everytime. If I dual-boot, I just do a boot disk and don't bother risking any weirdness. If its an all linux system either grub or lilo are fine.
You'll need to pick you packages (software). There's a lot of stuff and a lot of it you may never use. I don't even know or use half of it, so just browse thru it and decide what you think you might want. You can always install more packages later if you need to.
Uses for linux- Linux is great for most common uses. OpenOffice works exactly like M$office and can even use M$office documents. There are many web browsers to choose from. I usually prefer opera. You can run many windows applications with wine and even games, though winex is probably better for games. Those are emulators that make a windows-like environment for the apps/games to run in. You can play MP3s and movies and record CDs. You can fold in linux! There's really tons of apps out there, too many to list!
The trick is getting used to the command line, unix permissons, learning where to find help, getting the hang of 1 text editor and figuring out where all the config files are and setting them up the way they need to be. On distros like redhat, mandrake, et al... a lot of stuff is done for you or there are gui's to do it much like in windows. We're here to lend a hand if you need us.
