Linux = dna from www, a product of the liberalisation of information in the 21st C. The bright new future of Os's...as well as a clear sign to people everywhere of our ability to work together as humans in groups unfettered by government inteference and meddling. We are self organising and responsible people who deep down are good; we want to help each other and can develop complex systems as a community.

I want to be a part of that. So I am migrating...

I have read alot now about moving over to Linux. About how easy it is from seasoned techies. And about inumerable problems in the chat rooms and threads.

Went for Slackware 9.1 (MISTAKE). I have it on the desktop ready to get on the system running dual boot with XP. Why dual boot? Because frankly. I am deeply nervous about the whole affair.

I've used Win for as long as I can remember and am familier with the interface. Office XP is buggy as hell. XP is a pain in the ass. We all know that. A recent virus problem and growing paranoia re: security has spurred me to change Os's.

Slackware. Looks cool. Sounds cool. Google it..."easy to install". RUBBISH!! Google search anything to do with Linux and (Yawn) you find unintelligable techno speak of resolving problems and difficulties (no matter what the distro). Compatability issues etc etc. MS can do it with very few problems...

Question: why is the Linux community incapable of developing a no BS install of the OS? MS has ben doing it for years. What is everyone doing? Developers are creating brilliant and complex alternatives to existing software on the mkt through the open source community. The work that is done is largely gone ignored through a lack of understanding and blindness. Do developers not understand that if they develop a good program, they need to do all they can to get it to as many people as possible? Isn't that what the open source community is about? Isn't that why they do it???? All this talk of MS / Win being inferior / problematic is moot for the vast majority of people simply becuase of the difficulty installing it on the PC. This is truly ridiculous.

Nonetheless. I am now downloading mandrake 9.1 with OOo and will try and install that dual with XP. Can I find an idiots guide to doing this? Of course not! It's Linux! Why persevere? Simply because I believe that the "learning curve" WILL be worth it, that I will add a little to the spread of competition among PC OS's, making things better for us all. Thus far, there are many issues that developers need to think hard about. Are you really trying to bring better products to end users? If so, why the barriers to entry? Does anyone know of a no BS morons guide that my mother could follow on installing Mandrake / Slackware? If not...why not?

it's worth the effort, but give it time

Have you tried looking at the OS homepage? All the major distributions have howtos and user manuals with instructions on how to install.

The reason difficulties with installations arise is that hardware manufacturers write their drivers for Windows. Often a manufacturer will not write or allow to be written drivers for Linux. Linux will run on anything - if you have an ancient pc a linux distro will install. Try getting later versions of Windows to install on a 486 and let us know the result!

The fact is that this site (and others like it) will have a multitude of questions and answers - I'd suggest searching this forum for any issues you have, chances are the answer will come up in front of you.

Welcome to the forum.

Moved to Linux - General. The post contains questions and I think they can get better audience here.

All I can say is distributions like Mandrake and Redhat, the installation has got to be the easiest part of the OS, much easier than Windows.

Some tips for dual booting Mandrake 9.1 and XP

Install XP 1st making sure you leave some unpartitioned free space at the end of your drive for Mandrake to go on later.

It might be advisable to create a separate FAT32 partition from XP to share data between the OS's - (Linux can't write to NTFS filesystems succesfully yet - with a separate FAT32 partition both OS's can read/write to/from the partition.)

Install Mandrake 2nd - during the install, choose the option to keep all existing partitions and install in the free space.

Install LILO to the MBR.

look on the mandrake webpage you can find howtows, or buy the retail version and get the manuals.

or read the instructions during installation it dont take a rocket scientist :P

no. you are.

what's truly ridiculous is the amount of people trying to make linux more annoying for the technically advanced nerd who came up with the idea in the first place and more windows-like for the newcomers.

Chill. What wrong with making somthing easier? Isn't that what technology is about?

Now if you mean "dumbing down" then I totally agree, but I dont know of any distro that is dumbed down to the point where you cant get into the nitty gritty if you want to.

Ah yeah... maoinchina, if you want it to be easier then buy a distro like SuSE. They have chopped down some trees and made a pretty good group of manuals out of them. I assume that other distros provide just as much tree for you money too.

good stuff indeed; thanks for the feedback. Technology IS supposed to make things easier for us; otherwise, whats the point? Re: manuals on Linux installs? No can do, I'm in the middle of Western China. There are no bookstores. Amazon takes 2-3 months (once they took 4...) to deliver. Greaaat.

I have managed to burn disc 2 of Mandrake onto a cd, iso 1 is proving hard to pin down, will keep trying as i'm pretty sure i'm not doing anything wrong. I get the message "could not peform endtrack". Ideas??

Am desperate to get this thing up and firing on all cylinders. Checked out mandrakes install guide on the site (thanks h1tman) and am more confident having inched (literally...) closer in the last 24 hours.

I do think the installation is easier in linux than in windows. The problem is that new hardware may not come with linux drivers.

Technology isn't necessary to make things easier. Commercial products do. The installation of programs is easy in redhat if you pay the RHN ($50/yr). Yeah, it is not free.

You can also try knoppix, lycoris and lindows. (English mode)

(One recommendation, I found that mandrake's i18n support is not enough, even redhat still has some problems in chinese. You may perfer red flag, turbo instead. Expect the CJK governments would bring a stable OS for CJK environment.)

could it be that the first iso is slightly too large to fit on a 74 min cd, and needs an 80 min one?

Bwahaha... this guy is crazy. One of the reasons that Linux is a tad bit more complicated is the option to not only install it, but the option to dual boot it! Which is where all of the partition and tech lingo occurs. Microsoft doesn't offer this nifty little idea, so be happy that it's a little more complicated for a much bigger effect!