newbie (idiotflavour) here,
I am seeking some advice on installing DSL on an old acer 273 with xp already installed on it that i have been given. I have burned DSL to disc and intend to boot from it. I have no intention of keeping XP on it at all or using a dual boot. So my questions are:
1) Is it essential that I delete the windows partition or is there anyway of deleting it without running XP (I don't think the machine is capable of booting xp) during installation ?
1a) is there any utility I can run to remove the partition?
2) I want to learn how to set up a home network with another wireless laptop (windows), a ubuntu'd pc, a mac ibook and this. Could I use this as a print server or file server? Any websites that might help?
3) Should I be thinking of using a different OS for above?


many thanks for any responses.

Ben

I have not looked at DSL in a long time, but most installers will allow you to let the installer automagically partition and format the drive, or you can do it manually. Since you are new, I recommend using the automagic option.

fdisk is the tool of choice for modifying partitions for the experienced user. DSL will probably have GParted, which is a graphical partition manager.

You can easily use it as a file server. Unless you have a well supported printer, you might find it hard to make it work as a print server.

Do you mean O/S? Or do you mean distro? If you are really new, you may have problems using DSL. For most newcomers, I recommend Ubuntu.

1) you don't have to delete it, just resize it with the gparted livecd as DSL does not have gparted
1a)you can use cfdisk to delete the partition
3)I would use a more user-friendly distro, but those might run slow