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I have winxp with 2 hard drives. 1 has winxp on it with 30G (C:/)and the other has 80G with only 15G used on it (F:/) which is the slave drive.
both are formatted with ntfs.
Can I partition the 2nd HD 'F drive' so I can fit linux on it. I would need about 20G of it.
Do I need to wipe it clean 'F drive' before I partition it or what can I do. It has software on it already that I prefer not to change.
Yep, just resize the ntfs partition on that drive to create enough free space, then create the Linux partitions you need. You will want a minimum of 2 partitions for Linux. 1 should be around 1GB for swap, and then the rest for the root partition.
Download and burn a Gparted LiveCD iso. It can resize ntfs partitions as well as create linux partitions. It is a good idea to make three:
1 for swap (= 2 x the size of your RAM with a maximum of 2GB)
1 which will hold your / partition (8 to 10 GB should be fine for most distributions)
1 for your home partition (as large as you want it to be) for your personal data
Download and burn a Gparted LiveCD iso. It can resize ntfs partitions as well as create linux partitions. It is a good idea to make three:
1 for swap (= 2 x the size of your RAM with a maximum of 2GB)
1 which will hold your / partition (8 to 10 GB should be fine for most distributions)
1 for your home partition (as large as you want it to be) for your personal data
Ok I downloaded gparted iso.
Now i need to download linux. To do this what is more popular these days Suse or Redhat? and can i downlaod either for free?
Well, both Suse and Red Hat are commercial products but there are free version as well: in the case of Suse, it's called openSuse, in the case of Red Hat, it's called Fedora (there is CentOS as well). You can get more ideas from a site like distrowatch.com or yolinux.com. And don't forger Ubuntu, Debian or Mandriva - those are very popular too.
Any of those should be fine, really. And perhaps Ubuntu is the easiest one to start with but the other ones are really close. If you want to restrict yourself to openSuse and Fedora, my own choice would be Fedora - if only because Fedora tends to have more community support and there are many more online Fedora guides than there are openSuse equivalents.
Anyway,they are all free so you can download and install all five or six if you feel like it and you have the space to spare.
Now i need to download linux. To do this what is more popular these days Suse or Redhat? and can i downlaod either for free?
Well why limit yourself ?
Personally, I'd suggest 3 partitons. One for the / (a.k.a. root), one for swap and one for /home. The seperate /home has the advantage, that because you're new to linux, you can start doing stuff i.e. setting up address books for emai, customistation, bookmark lists etc etc (you know, the normal stuff we often do without thinking), but if you get adventurous and want to try a different distro, as long as you don't touch the /home during install of a different distro (formating the partition etc etc.) then as long as the installer for the new distro see's the partition, it invariably "just works".
As for which distro ? Well if you're familiar with windows, then I would suggest one that uses the KDE graphical frontend. Not because it's necessarily better or worse than gnome, but because it feels a little more "windows like" and less different (which I personally prefer, because thats what I "cut my teeth" with). So if you wanted to go with whats popular, either Ubuntu, but then installing the KDE desktop or just go for Kubuntu (which is Ubuntu with the KDE already installed/configured).
Being part of the *buntu world, theres a mountain of assistance/help/guidance etc already available for it.
Oh and if it were my system with say 60 gig's available, then I'd make the / partition 15 to 20 gigs, the /swap 2x the installed RAM (thats from the traditional linux wisdom when 64 megs of RAM was a lot, unlike what people tend to have installed these days - my /swap is 1.5 gigs, with is roughly 2x the 768 megs of RAM I have installed) and the rest for the /home. That would allow me enough space to play with installing just about all the linux apps I might ever want to use in the /, while having plenty of space for user type stuff (music etc etc) in the /home.
Oh and with the gparted, I would suggest at very least, formatting the partitions as ext3 (you'd have to google for explainations of the pro's and cons of other file systems).
If you think it's likely that you'll want/need to have a facility to be able to write stuff to files in both OS, then it might be prudent to have a seperate partition thats formatted as FAT32, neither OS has a problem writing files in that file system - whereas, there are still some issues about linux writing files in NTFS.
How do i setup the partitions for linux with this exactly
/
/home
/swap
but can i use the install linux iso
Also how can i check the download with SHA1SUM as no file appears to download, I just get the text output when clicking on it.
It took ages to download and i didnt know forward port for my smc rounter. The problem is there are many ways to do this so i havent a clue where to start or if it is safe on current interent link.
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