New Laptop Want Linux on It.
Hello everyone. ...
I have some good news... Today my laptop came in from Dell. Spec's on it Dell XPS M140 Intel® Pentium® M Processor 750 (1.86GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB) Genuine Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005 1GB Shared DDR2 SDRAM 2 Dimms 100GB 5400rpm Hard Drive Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 900 Okay now I would like to load linux on it (Fedora 4) ... I started to load it and notice that I have to create a partition for linux:Pengy: ... Since the laptop came with a 100gig drive and XP has it all. I would like to give it linux 35gigs ... My question how do I create the partition since the whole drive is all XP? I want to have it as a dual system. plus would I also have the option to pick with one starts or prompt me what OS I want. Sorry for the dumb question but I'm a newbie.... Malachai... |
yes, there are things called boot loaders, which bring up a menu when u start computer to select an OS.
use windows and download partition magic. use this to resize the partition, freeing up 35gb. partition magic doesnt let you apply the changes unless you buy it. or maybe you could borrow someones who has it? or try a different piece of software, which does the same thing, but for free, or an open source program if u can find one. check out sourceforge or other linux program sites |
1. XP does not need all that space. XP need only have a few gigs at most - plan to give it 10 gigs. The rest is to be free space. I'll tell you what to do about it later.
1a. give serious thought as to why you need windows - if you have ever done dual boots before, you'll know that windows does not play well with the other children. These days, everything you want to do in windows can be done in linux. The thing is brand new? never done anything in windows on this machine yet? 2. Back up any personal files you want to keep. You don't need to back-up windows because you have the install disk right? 3. Normally you will have to make all your files visible then defrag the drive. Since this is brand new, it shouldn't be required. (Defrag anyway - it'll tell you if things have been used or not.) 4. Boot from disk1 (or the dvd) - I believe the disk druid will let you resize partitions these days. Otherwise, you'll want qparted - available in varous live distros and on generic rescue CDs. Follow the instructions. When you get to the disk-druid, you'll use the advanced options and resize the existing XP partition ... this will be listed as having an ntfs file system. Next, you want to select partitions for linux. You could just select the default to be stuck in available free space. But better is as follows: partition mountpoint type size boot /boot ext3 2Gb swap n/a swap 0.5Gb dos /usr/dos vfat 1Gb home /home ext3 20Gb root / ext3 all the rest of the space a lot of folk make a usr partition (mountpoint /usr type ext3) as well. don't worry about RAID or LVM - you only have one drive. Then the installation can procede normally. In windows, you need to define the dos partition as another hard drive. In linux, you'll be able to mount the dos partition normally. This is used to share files between XP and Fedora without headaches. Once things are going, you should visit www.fedorafaq.org and read everything. Also visit www.mjmwired.net for the FC4 install notes there. Personally I wouldn't reccommend FC4 for a newbie. OTOH: crash course time :) I'd have suggested Mepis or Ubuntu. However - you are strongly urged to do away with windows completely. What do you need windows for anyway. |
Well thank you both for replying back to me. Yes its a brand new laptop... The reason I would like to keep XP on it for school...
I was looking threw XP the disk space... I did notice that it has a hidden partition on it ... That's the ghost image that dell loads when you have to restore the laptop back to how I received it. There is other partition that is 4gigs fat32... that one I will not touch ... I will look for partition magic and see if I could do it that way... So 35gigs should be enough for me right? once I notice that I don't need XP I will delete the partition and reinstall it again. For now I would like to have the dual boot. I will check out the 2 links you gave me, if I need help with something else I will make sure I post it here... Thank you once again. Malachai |
That's something about Dell that nobody seems to know......
DON'T DELETE ANY PARTITION THAT IS NOT NTFS!!! Two reasons:
If it's a new Dell, and you ever need to call Tech Support (for hardware), they will ONLY SUPPORT THE OS IT WAS SHIPPED WITH. So go ahead and get rid of XP. But if you need to restore XP, do the restore Same with diagnostics. If they aren't there, you would have to download them After your conract/warranty is up, do as you wish. |
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What exactly do you need it for, for school - is it to use the school LAN? Is there a computer course that requires specific software? Your teachers will expell you if you don't use windows? 35Gig will be OK for fedora - just for experimentation. You realise fedora is a very big distribution? The basic packages will take up about 6-7Gb for an "everything" install. Most people will do an everything install (and take the performance hit) until they discover what apps they like to use, then remove the packages they don't use when they upgrade. |
Well I need XP for software that the instructor wants use to load... That's the only reason why I'm keeping it.
I haven't found Partition Magic yet the free ver... does anyone know of other open source that I could use for spliting up my drive like Part Magic? |
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Hey fair_is_fair
Thanks for the link. But will that work even though I have XP loaded right now. The whole partition is XP... I read on it but it just talks about linux... I don't have linux install yet.... |
You are supposed to be able to run it from a live cd to do the partitioning chores. Many live cd distros include qtparted. But, like I said previously, I have not used it to make changes. I have ran it to view partitions and it looks very simple.
http://applications.linux.com/print..../06/22/1941252 |
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