Hello everyone,

I'm here to start a new journey to linux from windows, as I started it several times by myself with no success. I hope this time with a little help from you guys will finally make it.

Thanks to all of you.

Find a distro that has a live CD and take it for a spin. Go to:

http://www.linux.org/dist/

Click on the drop-down selection box "category" and then click on "live CD" then click on "go" and do some reading.

If you're just asking for a recommendation, I'd recommend Ubuntu. It was an easy switch from Windows. If you're using a laptop, you'll need to make ONE small tweak (probably in any distro) or you'll find that you will probably bump the touchpad while typing and then your text will end up being inserted in another paragraph.

In Ubuntu, you'll click on System, Preferences, Startup Applications, then "add" and type the following in the box next to the word command:

syndaemon -i 1.0 (you can change the 1.0 to a 2.0 or even 2.5)

You can put anything in the name and comment boxes.

When you restart Ubuntu, that command will run and disable the touchpad while you are typing for the amount of time in seconds that the number says. I recommend a couple seconds myself. The downside is that when you stop typing to move the mouse, it will take that long to get control of your mouse.

It's not perfect, and you can still move the insertion point (cursor) by mistake if you pause long enough while typing, but it's not as much of a problem. Longer durations work better but take longer to get control of your mouse. Keeping your fingers away from the touchpad is the best solution.

Hi t2000kw,

I've tried to install Ubuntu but it gives me an error. It says something about having a bad cd/dvd, or hard disc. I already had installed opensuse 11.1 and it installed ok, so I don't think it is my hardware. The problem I had with suse is that I couldn't get it to use my wireless adapter, as I checked it with the Ubuntu Live CD and it worked fine. I'd like to try Ubuntu as you said seems a lot more similar to windows than suse.

Any advise please? Thanks.

There is supposed to be a way to check the integrity of the downloaded ISO file. I'm off to work soon and will have to check again. I rarely encounter any corrupted files when downloading but it is possible and I think I had one ISO file recently that was corrupted (for another Linux distro I tried). I didn't do the MD5 check on it, I just downloaded it again and made sure I didn't do anything else on the PC, letting it download overnight.

When you boot to the Ubuntu live CD, there should be a menu option (where you can select "run live CD," "install Ubuntu," etc. There are several options to choose from, and one of those should be to check the disk integrity. I never check that, but I have very reliable downloads. I'll bet that you have a corrupted CD ISO image hat you burned the disc from. The fix is to simply download again when nothing else is going on with your PC, no scheduled maintenance (anti-virus scans, defragging, etc.), like overnight.

See if that doesn't fix your problem. There is another approach, but see if this helps. I've never used the alternate install disc approach.

Thanks t2000kw, it worked.

If you want to know what happened. The MD5 was ok. It was at the time of burning the CD. After burning it at a lower speed it worked.

Thank you very much, and now I'll keep with the quest.

hi everybody i a riya and new to linux

drodri03, let us know what you think, and for rajsajni, if you try Ubuntu, let us know if it seems to be easy enough for the beginner.

There are some tools "under the hood" that are hidden but accessible if you know what to do. The book Ubuntu Hacks, though a bit dated, is useful. There's another, Hacking Ubuntu, that is not as packed with information, but still useful. And one other, the Ubuntu Bible, is a rich source of information. I got all three of these used. If you can afford it and can still find them used (try www.addall.com), try to get the latest edition. These books are often one version behind anyway, but even older ones (if not TOO old) should be useful. Just expect some menu items to be in a different place. But commands in the terminal will probably be the same for most things.

There are other great distributions available:

http://distrowatch.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari..._distributions
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/

I've tried several of the more popular ones and settled on Ubuntu. Some prefer Debian, which is less "bloated," but Ubuntu is almost the way I want it "out of the box."

You might want to install Art Manager to download different backgrounds. I hate the default colors and settled on an undersea deep blue Gnome background. You can, of course, get backgrounds yourself and set them up. art Manager makes it easy to do and you get a lot to choose from. Give it several minutes to download all the thumbnails of the backgrounds it can find.

Donald

Hi t2000kw,

I'm still struggling with the installation, by now I'm not sure if it is my hardware or what. I tried Ubuntu in live mode and it worked fine to me, did the installation, but when clicked finished after reboot there's a message about not finding the boot drive. I tried openSuse 11.1 and it installed fine the first time, but after all this struggle with Ubuntu tried it again and it failed (it would not boot even from the CD drive). By now I'm really lost.

My hardware configuration is as follows:

Intel Core i7-920 2.66 GHz CPU
Asus P6T Deluxe V2 motherboard
Asus EN9600GT Silent video card
Hauppauge HVR-2250 TV Tuner
6 GB DDR3 RAM
WD 160 GB HDD (this is where I installed Ubuntu)
WD 250 GB HDD (here I have some music)
WD 320 GB HDD (here some videos)
LG GGC-H20L Blue-ray combo
Silverstone CW02 case
Silverstone ST45NF 450W PSU

I'll appreciate your help. Thanks.

Just installed windows for the first time on this PC and everything is fine, it does not give me that message saying to choose a bootable drive as it did with ubuntu 9.04, linux mint 7, and mythbuntu. So it's not my hardware.

Sorry for the delayed reply. I have had some "window" cleaning to do
and it set me back a few days starting all over, restoring some things
from a backup, finding that some things can't be restored, etc.

Anyway, I'm not sure what version of Windows you are using. And it
sounds strange that you could boot from the CD before but not now.
Have you had issues with your CDROM before? If you burn the disc
again, burn it at the slowest burn setting you have available on the
best media you have. Cheap CD-Rs sometimes are unreliable. If you're
using CDROMs and a CDROM drive together that never gave you problems
like this, then burning at a slower setting will help guarantee that
you at least won't have a corrupted disk.

I assume that you are familiar with partitioning or you wouldn't be
trying this, so here's how I have mine set up.

I have Windows Vista on partition #1. Ubuntu swap is #2, root is #3,
and my home partition (optional) is #4. I installed GRUB to the
Ubuntu root partition using the advanced button near the end of the
install routine. Otherwise, by default it installs GRUB in the master
boot record (MBR) of your Vista partition (true also for XP).

With Vista, you can download and install NeoSmart's Easy BCD.
Directions are on their site on how to install Grub on the root
partition of Linux. Once Easy BCD is installed, make a backup of your
MBR and save it somewhere safe, then add Ubuntu to your menu and save
it. I forget with other things you need to do but their instructions
should explain it well. It's not as simple to recover your original
Vista MBR but it is possible.

If you have XP, you can use any compatible boot manager.

I avoided using GRUB to do this because I read somewhere that Windows
Update sometimes won't work if the original MBR is not in place. I'm
not sure if this is true or not.

I have used GRUB as the boot manager with XP without any problems.

You can get more specific help in the Ubuntu forums, but I think we
will have covered the basics here.

You do need at least two partitions for Ubuntu, SuSE, etc. The swap
partition (/swap)should be a gigabyte or two, and at the very least
least whatever your RAM size is. You need a root (/) partition.
Everything can go into there, OR you can set up one additional
partition for your own files, a home (/Home) partition. My swap is 2
or so GB, root is maybe 25-25 GB, and my home is about 40 GB.

If your Windows fills the drive, you need to shrink it to make room
for your additional partitions. Gparted might do what you need, but I
used Acronis Disk Director. There are some free utilities and some
commercial ones, like Partition Magic. Just be sure that the one you
use will handle the file system for your Windows version. You won't
need to format the Linux partitions since the installer can do that
for you pretty quickly and will probably do it anyway, even if you did
format them before you install Ubuntu.

Back things up first!!! If you don't and something bad happens, you
might not be able to get back what you lost otherwise.

If you did install Windows from your PC maker's factory disk, it may
have reset your BIOS. Mine did, and I didn't think that was possible.
If that is the case, you will need to re-set your BIOS to make it boot
from the CDROM drive first.

Let us know how this goes.

If you need much quicker help, the Ubuntu forums react fairly quickly
if you post your question in the appropriate topic area. Most of the
people there are kind to newbies.

Good and bad news. This morning I just figured Grub wasn't being installed where it supposed to. Ok, I have three hard drives as I showed you before. A 320, 160, and 250 GB, called by Linux Mint 7 x64 by sda, sdb, and sdc respectively. I want to install the OS in sdb since the other two have music and videos. By the way, this is a new computer I just built and all the data I care about is in those two bigger discs. Anyway, I figured Grub had to be set to install in sdb (and I'm not sure if sdb1 should be the right place to put it), and now that message I mentioned earlier about having to choose a boot drive is gone. It seems that now Grub is loading. But choosing any of the options there gives the following error:

Error 15: File not found

Press any key to continue...

Before installing Mint I gave a try to Mandriva and it installed without any problems, but the discs were named differently. The 160 as sda, and at that time Grub installed in sda, interesting. When I installed windows, which it was Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, I noticed the drive was named H instead of C as usual! This made me ask myself where Grub was installing, and figured that the OS names the drives at its discretion, and furthermore that the naming of the drives was causing the problem. The thing is that after changing Grub installation to sdb, instead of hd0 which was the default, Grub loaded. Now I have this other error.

Here's more detailed configuration on my drives. The P6T MB has 6 SATA ports and 1 PATA. It turns out that my 320 HDD and CDROM drive are SATA, and the 160 and 250 HDD are PATA. I just found that this MB also has that feature to let you choose the boot drive, and as the MB sees it, they have the following order:

Drive 1 320
Drive 2 CDROM
Drive 3 160
Drive 4 250

The two SATA first, then the two PATA. It might be because of this that the 160 is not seen as the first drive at boot time, I really have no idea. I installed Grub in sdb1 and got the same error, tried without installing it and still the same error.

You may need to know that I set the following order in the boot section of the BIOS (and this was the first time I turned the PC on):

1st boot drive [CDROM]
2nd [160 HDD]
3rd [Removeable device]

And I suppose that's independent of the order the MB sees it. Well that's the actual order in which the hardware is pluged into the MB so that makes sense.

Now, all this happened while trying to install Mint. Lastly I tried with Ubuntu again and it worked! I finally booted in Ubuntu from the hard disc!

The difference with the few first tries at the beginning with Ubuntu was changing Grub to install in sdb (not sdb1) instead as the default hd0. Interestingly though, at boot time appears as booting from hd0. This is weird!

Well I think it's time to keep going. Lets see if I get to install the drivers for the rest of the hardware, tv tuner, and iMON remote control. My goal is to have Mythtv working in this PC.