Thou Slackers who art much smarter that me:

It seems like everyone I know could easily switch to Linux if they wanted to but won't. Meanwhile, I want nothing more than to get out from under Bill's thumb but I can't!

Slackers are cool, so I'm coming to you with my predicament.

I've tried all the major distros (except SlackWare)and have found most of them to be either fat and bloated or unapproachable. My best experiences being Kanotix and PCLOS. So I guess I tended towards the Deb distros.

As I've gone from forum to forum, and met all the different users out there, only two crowds really seemed to have a "culture" about them (or sub-culture if you will). That would be the infamous Ubuntu crowd (a little immature at times... but a culture none the less) and then there was... Slackware/Slax/Vector. The latter seems much more mature and much more... secure.

Anyways, I've loved Slack (and Vector) from a distance, afraid to touch it because I come from the land of noob. Not only that, but I'm a professional and I only have 1 computer. Read that last sentence twice. I'm a web master and on call 6 days a week... that leaves me just 1 full day to this conversion (1 and a half if I start saturday afternoon).

Here's the deal: I run a VPN client, IE 6.0, Adobe Creative Suite, and some video software. I can deal with dual boot for games and video editing, but I really need access to the others mentioned from within Slack if I'm to make my home there. My transition would probably never be complete until some professional level video software could be run there as well.

I also have a lot of important data on my machine. I can back it up if I must reformat but I would be VERY appreciative if someone knows of a non-destructive way I can go about getting linux on my machine. Plus I'm on an NTFS drive (the best choice for a Windoze only box)but it is my understanding that linux doesn't play nice with NTFS. Suggestions welcome.

So is this doable? I'm willing to put out the money for crossover office if I must. While I love SW from outside the window, I understand that maybe this isn't the best distro for me. I just ask for your advice. 'Cause Slackers rock.

Thanks for whatever help you can offer me.

-Garrett

PS: So you know where I am skill-wise: I know enough to edit my xorg.conf and enter some basic commands in the term (like apt and su mostly). I've dual-booted several times and even VMed once (I can't do this any more because my job depends on my machine now).But I'm pretty noobish other than that.

My advice: do it, but take the time. One day is probably too short to get Slack up and running how you want it for the first time. You will have to learn a lot about the different configuration files. But once you get to know it, you will like it and be able to set it all up quickly the next time. In your situation I guess that it is best to dual boot, but rely on Windows for the time being. When you have got some spare time, tinker with Slack. You will see that your knowledge of Linux will grow quickly.

As for resizing NTFS: it is possible with Ntfsresize. I guess that it is best to use a live CD that has Ntfsresize and GParted, since GParted allows you to use Ntfsresize easily. A GParted live CD can be found here (which happens to be based on Slack ):

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

You could also opt for Partition Magic. But it is payware. In any case, make a thorough back up.

CrossOver Office is a good choice for migrating to Linux. I use it while I have never actively used Windows since Windows 3.11. It runs Internet Explorer very well (handy for checking websites), and runs Microsoft Office (I use LaTeX and troff, and have Office installed to read files from others, frankly I don't really like the size of OO.org). Codeweavers is a good and friendly company, and they donate a lot of code back to the WINE project.

At any rate, have fun and enjoy the ride! It will be bumpy, but educating. These two books are good guides to help you:

http://www.slackbasics.org/
http://www.slackbook.org/

As GlowGlow mentioned, you'll need to partition your drive (I've used PartitionMagic on a SATA drive, NTFS, no problems). You don't need to do the Linux partitions with PartitionMagic, you do that with the Slackware install (I have a 200G disk that I partitioned into 20G for WinXP and the rest for Linux). When Slackware is installed in a dual boot box it can mount an NTFS file system and read from it (so it's pretty easy to copy files to and from); you'll be asked about that during the install.

You'll probably want to get the Linux version of the VPN software you need -- if you're connecting to a Cisco, their software works just fine in Slackware (whoever your support person is will have to get the package from Cisco). It's no big deal to install, but be sure you get the latest version.

I only keep WinXP alive for FamilyTreeMaker, Stamps.com and TurboTax -- and, of course, the constant barrage of security updates. Other than that, your Adobe software may or may not be usable with CrossOver Office (which is quite good and getting better all the time -- it's worth the price of admission if you have to have Windows stuff). CrossOver supports Microsoft Office (in, I believe, all incantations), but you can, if you are familiar with Office, install OpenOffice and you've got pretty much the same thing (for a lot less money) -- it's about 98% compatible with Office (and getting better at it.

How long's it going to take? Well, doing the repartition maybe a half hour. Installing Slackware, maybe an hour (be sure you install everything). Configuring, fiddling, getting it the way you like it... well, who knows. You should be up and running and a couple of hours but then you've got the learning curve -- the links GlowGlow suggests are a good starting point.

Don't be afraid to spend a couple of bucks on software like PartitionMagic and CrossOver; you're talking about $60 or so and these things save you wads of time and effort. Free is good, but good isn't always free so figure from there.

Best of luck and welcome aboard!

In addition to "welcome to the family!" and "We'll make you an offer you cannot refuse ... " I'd like to offer some other suggestions in addition to the excellent points both GlowGlow and tronayne have made =)

The old addage goes: "when you learn <distro> you know <distro>, when you learn Slack, you know Linux. This is arguable a lot of pretentious balls, but, it's true enough. Any distro that uses a lot of raw vanilla in it's making is an amazing learning tool. Gentoo and Slackware are the only ones I can really point at off the top of my head and say: "learning!!", but I am positive there are other less major-branded that will do the same task.

The point I'm making is, if you don't know before you start and expect to become proficient enough in one afternoon to make the switch wholly to Linux (of any variety) you are going to have problems. Something will go wrong somewhere. As everyone has suggested, dual-booting will make the transition easier, but I'd like to offer a 3rd option:

Go buy a cheap box. Might be an old laptop (if you can get Linux on a laptop, putting on a desktop is *easy*!), might be some bits scrounged from friends who have upgraded, might be a £100 ebay jobby ... it doesn't really matter, what matters is that you can practice safe slack without risk to your main machine. And once you have the network card running on your new box, you can play with VPNs, remote-shelling, x11vnc, vnc generally .. etc etc etc all these things and experiment. My first Linux experience was with a laptop. I played with it for a year before I moved to switch everything else over to it ... alright, so you might not have that sort of time/patience, but having a second PC available will speed your debug process along 1000%. Picture it: "My modem doesn't work under Linux", so you scribble the error message down, restart into doze, post on LQ, wait for a response, then switch back and try 1 thing at a time ... that's a lot of dead-time when you could just fire up the other box and have a rummage around google

Now to address your specific program worries:

* VPN client
* IE 6.0
* Adobe Creative Suite
* some video software.
* Games

For the VPN, as tronayne has already said, you will need your client software. If you're *not* using Cisco, you will need to mess with the whole PPTP thing, which can be a bit of a nuisance. It involves kernel patches and lots of reading ... however there is this really neat guide (http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...ackware_How_to) that talks you through it. Just read the instructions and away you'll go! Oh, and don't forget to add any remote hosts you want to be able to connect to in your config file ... you can ping me when you get that far if you need any help =D

IE 6.0 I hear works on Crossover, but equally, it'll probably work with Wine, too. Wine is an excellent tool for these kinds of things ... and speaking of Wine ...

I have never used "Adobe Creative Suite" but I did install Photoshop 7.0 under Wine once, which worked very well. And if it didn't work under Wine, then you can always try Cedega (mostly they're all about DX support, but they also deal with InstallShield programs nicely). It's a small cost, again (~$15), but worth every penny.

Try your video-editting software under Wine, Cedega or Crossover and see what happens. You might be suprised. If it doesn't work - you've not lost anything =D Also investigate alternatives. You might find something that does exactly the same thing natively under Linux ... who knows! It's always worth looking into these things.

Finally, try the games under Cedega - with a bit of perseverence you'll be suprised at how many games *will* run like that (I'm hacking on Wine atm, trying to get the wretched thing to work with WoW ... what a pain!)

Lastly lastly lastly ...

Linux doesn't play nice with NTFS, but you can cheat and make the windows NTFS drivers play nice with Linux for you ... investigate captive-ntfs. It's stable, it works, but it is slow. I would not advise it for more than light (small <1mb) documents. Your best bet would be to invest in another hdd, format it as FAT32 and then use it as a documents drive.

I wouldn't usually advocate buying so much stuff, but, you've got to put a price on mission-critical uptimes sometimes, and that price in this case could be some more hardware.

Let us know how you get on!
- Piete.

I second piete.

Buy an old machine. I'd suggest a desktop with CPU of around 200 MHz or more, 64 MB of RAM or more and at least 4 GB of hard drive.

Then you can play to your heart's content and not worry about messing anything up: Well, you do have to pay attention to your monitor's horizontal and vertical refresh rates in xorg.conf.

One addition to Piete's excellent post. You can also choose to try Slackware in a virtual machine first, before installing on its own partition. This will allow you to tinker with Slack without repartitioning, and allows you to learn as if you were running it on bare metal. VMWare has only a marginal speed loss, and VMWare Player is free to download. You can use the VMX Builder program from this site:

http://petruska.stardock.net/software/VMware/

to build a virtual machine image. Of course, you can also get the 30-day version, or buy VMWare workstation from vmware.com.

Hi,

I like a lot of the suggestions but. I am a retired professional and believe you should stay away from your production machine if possible. One, if something should go awry you could be left in deep water without a boat, just the anchor.

I agree to get another cheap machine. Some good ones can be salvaged from parts that friends have left over from upgrades.
I really don't like the idea of using a low end machine. I would stay in the 1-2 G range for processors. My reason is that it can be frustrating to a new user to configure/compile the system with a low end unit.

Plus keeping to date with the new kernel options will aid your
experience.

Some suggested a hard drive purchase and use it in your production machine. I'm against that for above stated reasons.

To assemble a newer class machine is not that expensive here in the states. Motherboards are less than $50. If you choose to use the AMD processors the price can be lower,AMD athlon 1333 <$30. Memory is cheap, 512MB at about $30. A good hard disk, 80GB for less than $60. CDRWs' are real cheap, around $30. A mid atx case can be had for about $30 with a cheap power supply but who cares. Your not going to OC this anyway. If you want a floppy then add another $20.Video is not a problem if you choose a MB with on-board video, sound,NIC and of course usb. Most of this is available on low end products.

So for less than $300, you can have a box that will be used independent of your production boxen. Of course you can use your present keyboard, mouse and monitor to keep the cost down. You could get a kvm switch so you can choose between systems when you don't want to use remote access to either.

BTW, welcome to Slackware!

HTH!

Thanks for all the advice! Those are the most thorough answers I've gotten so far. Can't say I'm totally suprised though .

I'm going to have to chew on those suggestions for a while... I'm leaning towards a mid-range laptop (I need to get one anyways)or the partition magic. I built my current machine and windows xp crashed within 15 minutes of my first boot! It was around that time I wished I'd gotten that Mac...

While I'm deciding what to do, I do need one other piece of advice. Slackware or Vector.

I hear that Vector is generally faster and contains some decent administration tools. Are there any drawbacks to using Vector over pure Slack? Does it also use a newer kernel (probably essential for me... my computer is custom built and pretty bleeding edge.... SLI, Widescreen monitor, AMD 64, etc)? I don't really care about the initial loadout of programs, I'm on high-speed and I'm familiar with many of the linux packages from trying so many distros.

Thanks again for all your help.

Thanks again, you've all been VERY helpful!

-Garrett

Hi,

First for the Laptop! Look here;

http://www.linux-laptop.net/

or

http://www.linux.org/hardware/laptop.html

As for the Slackware vs Vector question. I'm biased, Slackware is my choice. The answer is actually in your post.

"I hear that Vector is generally faster and contains some decent administration tools."

Do you want someone else to do the work for you? That is why most people here choose Slackware. We wish to work on our systems and know what is being done at that time.

Someone's tools can be sad layer between you and the system.

Your choice!

HTH!

When I first started doodling with GNU/Linux (A GNU/Linux Journal) I possessed only my one production box (Windows NT4). Fortunately for me at that time, my schedule was flexible enough that I could tinker without losing production time. I used extra hard drives and did a lot of backups before I started learning how to partition my hard drive. Despite the long break in my schedule at that specific moment in my life, I was unable to learn as much as I had hoped and I restored everything from my backups.

As I progressed in my ventures, I realized that multi-booting is a fine intellectual challenge but is a huge PITA as far as being productive. This is especially true if the Windows setup uses the NTFS file system because direct write support from GNU/Linux to NTFS is somewhat hokey and risky. Eventually I inherited a hand-me-down box and I now use that second box to tinker with GNU/Linux. I still maintain my multi-boot box but that box is almost always booted into Windows.

With your schedule you do not seem to have the cushion of tinkering for a few weeks or even a few days.

From my experience, I recommend you obtain an inexpensive used box and begin your learning experience from there. Sacrificing your production box is risky and from the sound of your post, you simply cannot afford down time. As you admit to noob status, you will be unable to install any kind of multi-boot environment in only one day. That is an unrealistic goal and unrealistic goals cause stress. A lot of stress.

Some inexpensive NICs and a cross-over cable will allow you to network the two boxes. If you are short on desk space, a quality KVM switch will allow you to use your keyboard, video monitor, and mouse with both boxes. This is how I setup my two boxes. Using this approach eliminates any rush attitude to get converted and allows you to take your sweet time. In other words, you migrate in a slow but deliberate manner and sleep better at night.

Additionally, if your schedule gets hectic and requires you to focus on clients, you need not worry about your GNU/Linux migration skills. Just keep using your original Windows box as currently configured.

One nice element to using two boxes is that when you eventually get the two boxes networked, you can avoid all the associated challenges with partitioning your production box hard drive. You can maintain your current NTFS partitions as is. You network both boxes using Samba, share files between the two boxes, and let the native file systems on each box manage file operations.

In the case where you are using vertical market Windows products such as the Adobe or video software, you need not worry about migrating those programs. With that second box you slowly experiment with GNU/Linux software to replace the same tasks you currently perform in Windows. Far less stress and your learning experience becomes long-lasting rather than rushed and soon forgotten.

With that said, Slackware is not a hand-holding distro. You need a DIY (do it yourself) attitude to configure many aspects of Slackware. In that respect, a second box is a wonderful way to take your time to learn the fundamentals of GNU/Linux that Slackware requires you to learn. The link in my forum signature might help you in that respect.

Regarding Slackware vs. Vector, I recommend that if you go with Vector that you obtain the version that contains KDE. You have to pay for that version. The free version of Vector does not contain KDE but as a Windows user and noob, you will find KDE much to your liking in this migration effort. In that respect then, I recommend Slackware because you then can install KDE without additional cost because KDE comes standard with Slackware. On the other hand, IMO Vector provides better hardware recognition and auto-configuration than the standard Slackware. If migration is more of a concern for you than digging deep into GNU/Linux, then Vector probably is your better choice. I myself don't mind tinkering but there are times when Slackware's lack of hardware recognition and auto-configuration irritates me because I want to focus on production and not maintenance. There is no right or wrong answer, just decide for yourself which is more important to you.

I hope this helps.

Other thoughts:

1. As always, before doing anything on your one PC, make backups of any important data

2. Consider adding another hard drive to your machine, to be used exclusively for Linux. This allows you to avoid either repartitioning or resizing your NTFS drive, thus lowering any risk to your existing system, plus it's nice to have a separate distinct area reserved just for Linux. Dual booting in Linux is pretty straightforward and Linux doesn't really care where it gets installed (unlike Windows)

3. I don't know how extensively you tried those other distros, but if you want to practice using Linux safely, without risk to your existing data, check out a Live CD such as Knoppix, which is a self contained distro that runs entirely off the CD. Functionally it's no different than having Linux installed on your hard drive, but the advantage is that you can restore the machine to its previous state simply by removing the CD and rebooting back into Windows.

4. Purchasing a second machine obviously would give you the ultimate in safety, since you wouldn't be touching your existing box at all, and it's pretty amazing how powerful a used machine you can find for only a modest amount of cash. If you go this route, personally I'd recommend against a laptop due to the fact that compared to a desktop a.) they sometimes need a lot more configuration work to get everything properly and b.) you're locked into the hardware, and the option of substituting another model in place of a particular device (eg, video card, NIC, etc) just doesn't exist.

In any event, good luck with it and have fun

Thanks for all the replies!

I'm probably going to go the laptop, or sometype of mini-tower , route.

Although I admit to a noob statis, I have configured a multiboot environment several times with SuSe, Ubuntu, Mepis, and I did actually get a stage 1 gentoo up over a weekend, but that was before I got this job and before my other tower went kapoot.

I'm putting a friend on PCLOS with a dual-boot environment as well. That went very well... save for her win-modem.

My primary concerns were the software. I know there is very good oss for all kinds of tasks. But I need to regularly edit InDesign files and templates. I don't believe any oss lets me effectively do that, thus my reason for needing to master the Wine/Cedega/Crossover thing. Or I may need to run a VMware.

BUT, the KVM switch is an excellent idea. Being able to switch to a native windows/linux environment at will is very attractive. Although, one day I would like to ditch Windows all together. Maybe Universal binaries will become a trend and will be linux friendly... you never know.

Thanks for the help guys!

-Garrett