[lug] Installation Guidance Request

[Trent Turner]

Charlie, I recently went through the process you mentioned.  Here's some
of the steps I went through:

1.  Clean off Windows drive as much as possible.  on a 40g drive, I left
Office, Win98SE & a few gig of data along with a few gig of free space. 
About 13g in all.
2.  Defrag drive
3.  Run a partition manipulator.  Partition Magic if you're rich, fips
or some other free software.  I gotta believe most distros come out with
a free one.  My RH72 came with fips.  worked like a champ.  Anyways use
it to limit windows' partition.  (If you'd like to borrow the book &
RH72 cds, thats a quick & easy way to get started.  You can always d/l &
re-install better versions after you've played w/Linux a tad, eg 30m.)
4.  Install Linux.  My experience was it correctly identified all of my
equipment & installed like a spring breeze!  Sound didn't work until i
unplugged my logitech webcam, found that tip on the internet.  Go
figger!

5.  When you install on an old machine like a 266, I'm assuming you've
got only about 8g or so.  Linux needs 3 partitions.  The installer will
try to build those for you based on the free space left on the drive
after partitioning.  the boot partition will have to be in the first
1000 cyl if your bios does not truly support LBA.  I wasn't sure about
this on my machine, went for broke & it worked.  If you can't dual boot,
then this may be your prob.  Buy a 2nd hd like someone else suggested.

6.  Also consider running Knoppix. It's a cd based linux & you don't
have to change a thang! on your Win setup until you realize how good
your life just got & you're ready to reformat drive & just run linux.

Hope this help, feel free to holler off-line. I don't have a boatload of
experience, but do have a bucket full of what might help you out! 
(Although most of it has been iterated above!  ;-)

Trent
On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 14:28, Charlie Rose wrote:
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> Gentlefolk!
> 
> Here's a *really* basic Newbie question for you. I want to install
> Mandrake 9.0 on a 266 MHz Pentium machine I have here that is
> currently running Windows 2000 Pro. My goal at the moment is to
> become familiar with Linux with the hope of eventually abandoning
> Windows altogether.
> 
> What are the first steps I must go through before starting the actual
> installation? I've identified all the hardware components in the
> computer because someone told me I might need this during the
> install. At some point, I'm going to have to format the hard drive.
> Can I do this with the Windows' Format command? If no, then what? Is
> this the first thing I do? What next?
> 
> With many thanks ....
> 
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> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Charlie Rose               FAX: 303-545-6674
> Innovative Scientific Analysis and Computing
> P.O. Box 1636, Boulder, Colorado, 80306-1636
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