I am finally going to give Linux a try and see how this works. I am marginally computer savvy so feel a little nervous. I just aquired a lease-return Dell D610 laptop from auction and will use it for recreational purposes (in fact, just surfing the web, downloading music, videos, etc).

My main question is once I decided to load a Linux OS on the computer how will I get all of the functional drivers loaded (i.e. wireless card, mouse, CD/DVD Drive, etc)? Also, will it be hell or will it be pretty easy and will there be directions to help me through this?

Also, please recommend the best bundle package to buy (obviously an opinion not fact) for someone like me that really just wants to ease into Linux and use the computer for nothing but the web.

Also, I imagine this has been covered countless times by others; if you know of a good website that answers all of my questions please feel free to direct me there.

Thanks,


Joe

Welcome to a new world. Linux comes with its drivers included. Only occasionally does a person still need to fetch and install a driver oneself, usually when the hardware is newer than the operating system or when manufacturers have elected not to release any information to the developers.

Hell or easy? That would depend on what you know, both about computers in general and about Linux. There are distributions which make it easy (Ubuntu, Mandriva, Suse, MEPIS) while other ones require you to have some experience or at least the willingness to work your way through a couple of manuals.

And the best news: you don't need to buy anything but an empty cd/dvd. Linux is free unless you want to pay for a commercial distro but most of those do not have much more to offer (except official support) .

Good site? Try google. If you select one the popular ones, you shouldn't have any trouble finding all the information that you could ever need.

If you are talking about the install medium, you shouldn't need to buy anything if you have a CD and/or DVD burner and a blank disc. You can get a free Ubuntu CD from shipit as well if you decide to go that route.

If you want a different distro, if you want a physical book for instructions, or you want call support, then yes, you will have to buy.

Se your own post here http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...stions-663496/

where you ask more-or-less the same question and get answers.

Salasi,

Thank you very much for both pointing out the other post that I had as well as linking it on this page. When I initially wrote the first post I hit the submit button and did not see it show up. I checked the next day and it stated after I logged in that the forum did not show that I have posted any question so I did not think that I had. I actually think I wrote that same post three times, just do not know if I sent it that many times.

Also, very good reply and advice. Another question that I have is if it would be difficult for a newbie to keep Windows and partition the hard drive for a Linux distro? If you could let me know you or others could provide there thoughts on this I would apprciate it; I found this discussed a couple times when I Google Linux.

Thanks,

I haven't really done this much recently; I've got a dual boot laptop, but other than that I've managed to keep completely free of windows recently, but in times past (>5 years ago) I used to dual boot, so my observations may be a bit out of date:

• It is not really difficult to install a dual boot system.
• Install windows, shuffle the partitions a bit, install Linux should (90+ percent of the time) just work; install in the other order a bit more troublesome.
• There may be some difficulties if you re-install the Linux portion (probably to upgrade the Linux distro or to 'distro hop'.) This probably shouldn't be the case, but it could happen. Some distros (the bigger ones?) are probably better at this than others.
• OTOH, if you re-install the windows portion, you are likely to have problems, because windows has little respect for other OSs on the disk. You may get away with it without additional effort, but it seems more likely that you won't.
• In any case, its probably just a bit of hackery with the boot loader to bring things back, but that may or may not be something you would like to contemplate regularly.
• Vista, with its paranoid idea of 'DRM everything' is known to be more problematic than older versions of windows.

Neither of the re-install situations should be massively problematic if you have the insurance of a good backup; doing it without a good backup is just too scary to contemplate.

You should consider virtualization instead of dual booting. If you don't need extreme performance, virtualization offers some big advantages over dual booting.

That's a tricky one - with the FAT32 filesystem it was trivial to resize a partition. An NTFS partition is not trivial to resize. Looking at the 'parted' website (http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/index.shtml):

"Parted can also detect and remove ... (snip) ... NTFS, ... (snip) ... filesystems, but cannot create, resize or check these filesystems yet."

So you will either need to use native WinDuhs tools to resize the NTFS partition or perhaps some non-free software like Partition Magic or Partition Commander can do it. In any case, BACKUP! If you have a power glitch any time during a partition resize operation, you're screwed.

Also, be extremely careful of the choices you make when installing Linux - some options simply nuke your HD and make one huge partition. This is a very frustrating thing, but WinDuhs always does that so new Linux users don't usually complain that such a thing is unfriendly or downright dumb.

ntfs resizing works with ntfsresize: http://man.linux-ntfs.org/ntfsresize.8.html
I believe the drak tools, qtparted and gparted use ntfsresize

I have installed MEPIS and some other Debian based distributions on multiple computers with Windows already installed in NTFS partitions. I used whatever GUI partitioning tool was obvious in the liveCD (sorry I forget the name) to resize the NTFS and create the Linux partitions.

When I didn't first defrag ntfs from within Windows, the resize usually failed (but did no damage). When I first booted Windows and used its defrag utility, then booted the Linux liveCD to resize NTFS, I had zero problems.

Since it's not a new computer, you ought to mention basic specs (total hard disk size, total ram size, maybe some CPU specs) when asking about installing Linux. If the specs are seriously lacking, you might be well advised not to set it up dual boot, or maybe even to select a lighter weight Linux distribution, or desktop.

I'm very happy with the Mepis distribution, especially as a first Linux distribution for someone used to Windows. Same with KDE (the default desktop in Mepis). KDE is closer to what a Windows user would expect than other Linux desktops. I have seen many posts claiming KDE takes more resources than some other desktops, but I've never tried it on any system so short of disk, ram or CPU power that you'd even notice how much resource the desktop takes.

A live CD such as Mandriva One would introduce Linux to you in a friendly way, while acting as a test for your hardware. Go and try Mandriva One, that's my opinion.

Yves.

I have resized (many) fragmented NTFS partitions successfully. I believe it can fail, but it is rare enough so it has never occured for me. And if it fails, it would be even less likely that data corruption occurs. It is still wise to backup your important data first, because nobody can say that it couldn't happen, but my experience is that it works well in the vast majority of cases. When the data is fragmented, it can take quite a lot of time though. It has happened to me several time that the resizing looked like frozen, that nothing happened. Actually it was very slow. Resizing a 60Gb disk took 45 minutes for me because the disk was near full and fragmented. If you have time, don't worry, it's working, just be patient.

Ditto on the question of re-sizing NTFS. GParted does it with no problems. I have read that you should always de-frag first.

The "booting" link below might help also.