Hi all,

after a long time of not bothering with linux (mainly because i didnt have the time or patience), ive decieded to try and give it another go. Mainly because ive just invested in a Fujitsu Siemans A1630 laptop (AMD 64 bit 3400+ CPU, 1gb RAM, 80gb HDD, ATI mobile 9700 GFX, Ralink RT2500 integrated wireless G network card connected to a linksys wireless G broadband router)

now...bear with me. im thinking of trying suse 9.1 pro, because i want a complete GUI based desktop environment. im thinking of doing this for the partitioning:

- Windows xp on a 15gb partition formatted to FAT32 (so SuSe can read and write to it). this would just be incase anything went wrong, i still have xp to back things up, and maybe xp for the odd game.

- Important info like work and docs on another 10gb partition, also formatted to FAT32 so i can update my documents on either OS and then be accessable from either OS too.

- 30gb Partition for general downloads and crap, again, formatted to FAT32 for the above reasons.

- Remaining 25gb for SuSe 9.1 pro install.

Im presuming if i install xp first, and create the XP partition, the downloads partition and the work partition, Suse will handle the remaining space for that install. now would this proposal ive got figured work ok? im presuming yes but im no expert so thought id ask.

Now that ive got all that sorted. i have a few software questions:

1 - i have all my important emails to date stored on windows in mozilla thunderbird. now how would i go about getting those emails from thunderbird, to Evolution, which i rather like the look off.

2 - the only possible reason id use windows, is to backup dvds, i currently use dvdshrink in windows, but theres no linux version, so is there a good alternative for linux? ive done a search and seen people have dvdshrink working under wine, some sucessfull and some not so sucessfull.

think thats about it for now. sorry for the long post and thanks in advane for any help and advice you can offer

Regards
James

Hi. One thing to bear in mind is you'll need another partition somewhere as a Linux swap partition. Unfortunately, you can only have four primary partitions on a disk, so to include this in your proposal, you'd need to use extended partitions. If you're comfortable with this, then there shouldn't be a problem. Otherwise, I'd advise that you create one less FAT32 partition (maybe only have one for documents
and general stuff). Or ask someone who knows more about partitioning than me
You'll definitely need to install XP first, and make sure you check the partitioning proposals made during the SuSE installation, or your Windows partition will tend to suddenly be very small.

Hope this helps!

Hi

thanks for that, so i could just have 40gb partition for docs/downloads and another partition for windows and the rest for suse. that sounds good.

i'll certainly make a point of checking the size of my windows partition during suse setup, but as long as i have 10gb or so, thats fine by me.

thanks for your help

also. as i have a 64bit cpu, will i really see much of a performance increase over using the 64 bit edition rather than 32?

cheers

No problem
I'm not sure what kind of performance boost the 64 bit edition will give. I'm still in the 32 bit age myself...

First, you don't have to have your Windows run in FAT32 since as far I have been using SUSE 9.1 Pro, there has not been a problem reading and writing files to NTFS (although you might encounter some). But it would not cause a problem if you just simply copy doc and other files from the Windows partition.

Just install Windows as normal and then install SuSE Pro, it would automatically mount the windows partition and handle all the hard works.

About your questions on 64bit processor. It DOES run much faster (noticable) on SuSE than Windows since SuSE fully supports 64-bit (I mean almost every distro does).

About DVD backup, you might want to try DVD-rip
http://freshmeat.net/projects/dvdrip/


Hope that this helps.