[lug] Hand Holding Needed

[Ed Hill]

On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 18:32, Charlie Rose wrote:
> Troops!
> 
> I have a new laptop (Compaq Presario R3000, 1.6 MHz, 60 GB HD, 256 MB
> RAM). It's running WinXP Professional SP2, now, but I'd like to make
> it a dual-boot machine so it will also run my Mandrake 9.0 Linux. I
> used PartitionMagic 8.0 to set up a 5 GB Linux Ext2 partition, and a
> 512 MB Linux Swap partition. (I did this because the PartitionMagic
> writeup told me to.) But now, I'm stalled. I worry mightily about
> charging ahead with the PartitionMagic instructions because I'm
> unfamiliar with some of the terminology, doing something dumb, and
> crashing the whole shebang. This, despite my having formed disk images
> of all my Windows partitions. Oh yes ... I've already installed
> BootMagic 8.0. Also, there's a Win-modem built-in, and I'd like Linux
> to be able to use it if possible.
> 
> I'd really appreciate it if someone knowledgeable about such things
> would be willing to give me some guidance, and answer some really
> newbie questions. Any takers?

Hi Charlie,

I can't spend a lot of time answering questions but I'd suggest the
following:

  - 5GB for the Linux partition is pretty paltry.  A better 
    setup would be three partitions:

      /        6GB *min* (8--10GB is better)
      /home    as much as you want for your data
      swap     about twice your system RAM (for safety pick 
                 2X the most RAM you expect to ever have)

  - Recent versions of Mandrake (and Red Hat and Fedora) will 
    all automatically detect the WinXP install and make your 
    system a dual-boot system provided that Windows is 
    installed first.  Its that easy.

  - WinModems stink so don't get your hopes up.  Info on them
    is available at:
      http://walbran.org/sean/linux/linmodem-howto.html

Good luck,
Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
office:  MIT Dept. of EAPS;  Rm 54-1424;  77 Massachusetts Ave.
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