Hi guys,
Im not so much a newbie, but its a newbie question.
Thanks for reading,

So, I am familiar with kde, ubuntu, mint, debian, somewhat in slackware and fedora.
I have a laptop with windows vista and kubuntu through wubi. But after installing several different linuxes, it wont boot windows bootloader at the moment. I can fix this myself, but Ive been thinking, the only reason Im not a full Mint user is because of drivers, and utilitys my windows has. But I got an imac now. A huge one too. So , no problems with basic utilities and stuff. Now I probably want a full disk just for mint.
But how should I backup all my files (Music, etc) to my mac?
And in mint, without windows aready installed, will mint find my proprietary drivers?
Is mint stable enough to do this?
Would another installation work together with mint, without problems, that isnt ubuntu based, even debian based. (KDE preffered.)
I also have a rare proprietary driver for my wifi that only ubuntu driver search will find. I would need help finding this wifi driver if there is another distribution without an easy driver finder?
Also, is there some kind of thing that I could use as a distribution, but has no GUI, meant for recovery or data and partition manager?
Any help is appreciated,
Thanks

The first thing I want to address here is Windows and Mint are completely separate. Yes they are on the same machine and installed on the same hard drive, but they run completely independent of each other. When mint boots and loads all the drivers and modules, it will not matter if windows is there or not. It doesn't even look at the Windows partition unless you have it configured in /etc/fstab to mount the windows partition automatically. And even if it is listed in /etc/fstab, the only thing it will do is mount the partition. I will not do anything with the data contained on the windows partition.

Linux is a totally different Entity than Windows.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you. I wasnt sure if it scanned the whole drive or just looked at the hardware, very useful information.

On to the rest of your post. I have used Mint 1 time, and I thought it was ok. Never really rang my bell, probably because I am a Debian user and I am comfortable with it.

KDE is just another X Environment. Most distributions will give you the option to use KDE instead of Gnome if you go to the advanced installation options. Even if you forget to do the Advanced installation options, you can always remove Gnome and install KDE afterwards.

As far as backing up your files to your Mac, well that should be fairly easy. Mac OS X runs on variations of *BSD (mainly FreeBSD and NetBSD) and actually the default command line shell is BASH. With that being said it shouldn't be to hard to install openssh on your Mac and then you can just scp the files over. If you can manage to get windows to boot you can grab a free utility called WinSCP. It looks similar to an ftp client and you can just transfer entire directories at once.

Hey there, welcome to LQ!!

That's a good selection of stuff to be familiar with, but how *much* familiarity will maybe determine what distros you choose. Are you familiar with Slackware and Fedora enough so you are aware, for example, that Slack will enjoy consuming more of your time than say, Ubuntu, when it comes to configuration, and that much more will likely need to be done by hand, rather than with GUI tools? And Fedora, while often suggested as a distro for newbies, is a fairly cutting-edge distro, which may not necessarily be rock stable?
I have never even installed Mint nor Fedora myself, so I can't really comment either way about them specifically, but if you feel very comfortable with any of these distros, then by all means, go with whatever one you like
Ok, drivers for what exactly? Can you provide make and model # for particular hardware you will be needing drivers for? Or provide the output of:
..and indicate what hardware you are having concerns about. Same for utilities; chances are good that *most* utilities you refer to, have Linux counterparts, but not 100%. What utilities do you refer to?
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Well, I know next to nothing about an Imac, I wouldn't know one if it fell on me but there are any number (dozens) of ways to back stuff up, or copy from one machine to another. Someone may be able to address this for you.
See above..
To do what? Install? Sure
Yes, you can mix and match virtually any Linux with any other Linuxes on a machine, and still boot them all. They won't conflict under normal circumstances; it doesn't matter whether they're Debian, Slack, SuSE, RedHat based, or based on whatever. They will get along
Again, see above about hardware & drivers. Of course we would help you locate and install whatever driver you need, provided it can be gotten somewhere to begin with.
Not completely sure what you're asking here, but most distros include a commandline partitioning tool. A popular GUI partitioning tool is Gparted, or QtParted, at least the former of which can be gotten as a standalone bootable ISO which you can burn to CD.
And, you could boot any number of different LiveCD distros, and just use the console of you like, to do your system maintenance or whatever; you don't absolutel have to use the X system.
Knoppix and SLAX are two popular choices for doing system maintenance from a CD.
And I hope this gives you some idea where to start! Again, welcome, and feel free to ask further, if you need more clarification on anything.

Sasha

Great answers guys!
No wonder people are so enthusiastic about linux forums being amazing.
Ill get back with the drivers and stuff in a bit.

So,
Im gonna try linux mint, No windows.
And I might use kubuntu too, not sure about that.
But for the drivers, I have a nvidea vedeo driver, easy to find, and a broadcom VTA wireless device (I think thats what its called) Those are pretty easy to get on the proprietary drivers
I would also like it if I could get a better driver for my alps mousepad. For more accuracy.
Im not sure If I need a driver for anything else.
But the thing is, I I chose another distribution not ubuntu based, I dont the get the proprietary driver program. Ill update you on what distribution I use.
For utilities that windows has, something like 7-zip would be nice. Also, Itunes is a big one. (I can always use my mac though.)
Is there a .iso file burner in linux? I cant seem to find one.
And I use g-parted right now, it runs fine, just wondered if there was alternatives.

Gparted = Qtparted = parted = (I think) fdisk = cfdisk for partitioning software. There are surely more, but I can't name them off top of my head.

ISO burner? There are LOADS, don't worry about that.. Brasero and k3b are just two. I burn ISOs from the command-line, so I can't name a whole whack of GUI burners, but there are lots of them

7-zip is no problem. An there's pkzip, zip, unzip, unrar, gzip, bzip, lzma, and if you run into a new enough version of an application like 'Ark', it's a GUI that pretty much supports all common formats of compression (not sure what the Debian or *buntu version of Ark would be.. Maybe "Arg" ??).. Lots of zippers and unzippers anyhow.

nVidia = easy to find. Little chance of problems there.

Alps mousepad & Itunes, again, I don't use these, so someone else will need to comment for you.

For your Broadcom thingy, there may be one or more routes to go for drivers; it will depend on the exact model of the gadget.

Best of luck!
Sasha

iTunes is not available on Linux. However you can still manage your ipod and iphone on Linux if you wish.

In Linux I use Rhythmbox Media Player or Amarok to manage my iPod nano 3rd Gen. I can manage my music, videos, etc this way.

Personally I keep a netbook with Windows XP on it to manage my iPhone. As I have not done a lot of tinkering in Linux for iPhone support. I am told you can use a package called iFuse to mount your iPhone or iTouch if you wanted to do things like reformat it, manage the files on the device directly, etc. I ahve not really explorered an iTunes replacement for the iPhone. I really should I guess but for now I just use iTunes since it will back up my contacts, calendar, media, etc. I have not found anything close to iTunes in Linux, and if there is something it definitely will not be able to access the iTunes Store.


I am not sure about your mousepad, but I would guess that generic Kernel drivers would work fine.

As far as your broadcom drivers go, like Sasha said, there are a number of options depending on you device. I have older broadcom devices here so using the b43 kernel module works fine since all of my devices use the BCM43xx chipsets. Best thing to do there is to google the model number of the device and the Distro of Linux you are using. You will most likely find an article on how to install it and get it working.

Thank you. I guess Il just use my mac for my ipod.

Is there a better way with larger file storage online then dropbox? Like 50Gb ? For free?

http://www.freewebspace.net/free/Fre...e-Host/details

You might find that interesting. I'm not sure if it's literally just a "file storage" place, or a webhosting place too, but it does allow up to 50GB of storage which I find quite amazing..

NOTE: I've never used it -- it's just an idea.

Thanks. It dosnt seem to work. The url for it, www.upload.frostbytez.com , dosnt seem to work.

http://www.freewebspace.net/free/Fre...e-Host/details

Sorry I gave you a sub-link.. Try that one.

EDIT -- you're right .. It doesn't seem to work

It still dosnt seem to work... ? Is there an alternative/ Or is there a different site to go to that?