Hello everyone,

I'm a CS student and felt it was about time that I installed a linux distro on my computer. We use ubuntu on the school computers, and I PuTTY into the system from home to do my work. It has been sufficient for now but I really want to take the next step.

I don't want to partition my hard drive, i'd like to keep everything dedicated to its own drive.


my system:
ibuypower customized desktop


<<< System Summary >>>

Motherboard : Asus PQ5 Pro
Chipset : Intel 4 series P43/P45 Express Chipset
Processor : Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.8 GHz each
Physical Memory : 2 GB [1 GB X2] DDR2-800 PC6400 Memory Module Corsair XMS2 Xtreme w/Heat Spreader
Video Card : ATI Radeon HD 3650
Video Memory : 512 MB
Hard Disk : 300 GB, NTFS file system, 7200 RPM
DVD-Rom Drive : Sony Lightscribe DVD-RW
Operating System : Microsoft Windows XP Professional 5.1.2600 Service Pack 2 Build 2600
DirectX : Version 9.0c


I don't use my inbuilt sound card, which is some realtek audio thing, but rather i use a firewire audio interface (M-Audio ProFire 610) for recording. i doubt it'll work with linux... I also have a firewire/usb2/eSata 1TB external Fantom Drive for audio files, movies, etc. It's formatted in NTFS.

I plan to buy an internal hard drive for my linux install, and was thinking about a Western Digital Caviar Blue 160 GB internal... but I've never installed a hard drive before so I would have to know what I need to get.

My goals with this system are two-fold: since i am also minoring in music technology, and recording is one of my passions, I want to continue to use XP for audio and OS-specific purposes... but I want Linux so I can immerse myself in the programming world, so to speak. I'm sure I'll learn a lot this way, and I know for a fact future courses will get deeper into Unix/Linux so I'd like a head start on that.

A quick response would be much appreciated because I'll be buying this stuff on newegg and would like it as soon as possible..

Also, since I'm already going to be cracking my case open, I figured I'd buy another kit of 2 gigs RAM. And I'll be adding a firewire card because my audio interface is having some problems with the inbuilt firewire port.


Thanks to anyone who bothers to read all this! I'll be checking this often so I can answer any follow-up questions. I hope I left enough info here.

Thanks in advance.

Fedora would work "out-of-the-box" with some help from Dangermouse.

You'll have the option of using the PCI(e) or integrated chip for sound.
I suggest either getting another computer for Linux or installing Windows on a virtual machine.
This will allow you to learn linux and run your MS apps.

Boot options should be in the BIOS if GRUB does not recognize the new drive.

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Why not try out a live cd first, or install vmware player and download a virtual machine ?

At least with a live cd you will see whether your existing gear works.

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Thanks for the rapid replies!

Mr-Bisquit - I don't really have the money to get another computer just yet... perhaps in the future I'll get a netbook or laptop to run linux or something. I didn't know what GRUB was, but looking it up, mentioning that name was damn useful lol.


This virtual machine talk has got me interested in using it, and I might consider using vmware later, but I'm just really looking forward to making my pc dual-booting lol.


smoker - good idea, my professor suggested that in the beginning of the semester and i forgot. I'll burn knoppix and let you know how it goes.

When you boot a live cd look for the toram boot option. Makes life easier.

Dual boot isn't a problem but your M-audio hasn't got support.If you use something like virtualbox you get the best of two worlds windows and linux at the same time the extra 2 GB would be advisable then and your sound can then be rerouted by virtualbox and you can eventually skip the extra disk if you can miss 10 to 20 GB depending on what you want to do.Topic about dual boot:http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...talled-481603/

Ok, so I booted knoppix from a live cd and it seems we were right in thinking the M-Audio interface won't work. But the onboard sound worked fine when I plugged my headphones in. The screen resolution was the same as it was in Windows, 1440x900. My ethernet card worked, I went to various websites; I tried youtube but Flash wasn't installed and I didn't want to risk downloading stuff because I didn't know where it would go lol. So for the most part, Linux will work fine on my setup I believe. Is there anything else I should be checking?


whizje - I might consider using one of those virtual machines if I ever feel like I'm going to need windows apps when I'm doing school work in 'programming mode'.


and thanks for the link to that other thread!



So, the hard drive type doesn't really matter, correct? I'm going to get the same type of internal HD that I already have, but with a little less storage, then install it and my firewire card and the 2gb of memory. then i'll probably use GRUB to set up the dual boot. I'm thinking either Ubuntu, Mandriva, or Fedora... I'm most familiar with ubuntu (which isn't saying too much lol). I'll eventually get a dedicated linux box and try some other flavors, but I'm really looking for ease of use, customizable, ability to ssh, and programming tools a la gcc, valgrind, ddd and etc.

I'm glad you have a Radeon card, because there are open-source Radeon drivers that support 3D ("xf86-video-ati", that is). Note that DirectX doesn't matter because Linux doesn't use it, it's a Microsoft thing, instead it uses "OpenGL".

No the hard drive type doesn't matter. But I would suggest you let whatever distro you go with, install grub on the first drive in the system. Or you may be back here sooner than you'd hoped ;-)

Also, knoppix has a facility to save your files from a live cd session to a file on your hard disk. Each time you load the live cd it checks for that file and reloads it. So you can install flash if you want. Deleting that file will give you a clean install again.

Note that flash can be difficult to install because it's not FOSS and has poor Linux support.

Thankfully Arch has some common non-free apps in it's repos, so installing Flash was a snap. But I definitely would NOT recommend Arch for someone new to Linux, it's very technical.