Newbie needs help setting up
 

Greetings,

I'm so new to Linux I still have not ordered :)

I plan on purchasing Redhat 8.0 and need help setting up HD to install.

I have WINXP on single 40GB HD. I plan on partitioning my hard drive as follows and need your opinions.

Primary = 10GB WINXP (NTFS)
Extended drive with 4 logicals (currently unallocated)
Logical 1 = 5GB Redhat Install (file system?)
Logical 2 = 5GB Redhat Swap? (file system?)
Logical 3 = 5GB WINXP Backup and files (NTFS)
Logical 4 = 5GB Redhat backup and files

Does this look correct? After setting up logicals should I not format them and leave them as they are and have Redhat format during installation? Can Redhat install on an unallocated drive?

Very, new so please excuse dumb questions.

Thanks!

Wait, there's more:

I have a Dell 8100 2.7GZH, 768 Ram PC, do I have to worry about printer (HP 990), scanner (HP 7400) and Nividia G Force 2 vid card not working in Linux? What about Norton Personal Firewall and AV?

RedHat can install onto an unformated, and unpartitioned drive. Your setup above seems to be fairly reasonable, except for one thing: You won't be able to share stuff (easily) between Linux and Windows. If you have some files, MP3s lets say, then you will want to have read and probably write access... and you can't do that with NTFS partitions under Linux. I would advise that you make at least one (preferable logical 3) a FAT partition.

Your graphics card is fine... nVidia provide their own drivers (and there are numerous threads on this very topic), but if you're not going to be doing anything graphics intensive (i.e. just wordprocessing), then the default ones should be fine. Your printer seems to be supported under CUPS, but as I don't have one I can't say if it's any good. And your scanner seems to be supported under SANE too, but that's still very beta.

Not sure how the Norton firewalls are setup, sorry.

HTH

Thanks for your reply.

Logical #3 Fat32? Logical #4 file system?

You see, Linux can use as many partitions as you want. I, personally, have a different partition for each of the following:
/
/boot
/usr
/home
So my setup would look quite different to yours. I would think that your best bet would be to setup your Windows partitions, and then allow Linux to set it's own partitions and sizes... leave the rest of the harddisk partitioned. Oh, and you say that you have a 40Gb harddisk, but 10+(4x5) = 30Gb...

Thanks for your help Thymox

;) No worries. Just remember where to come back to when you get your copy of RH.

Looks good excpet you dont need a full 5GB for the swap partition. I would make it say 1GB and and give your home partition some more space for saving files and such.

hi kmay,

768MB RAM ?? I guess you do not use this pc at home for general use :-)
Anyhow, I was never in use of more than 256 MB RAM till now...
As Thorshammer suggested, you should realy decrease the size of SWAP partition, let`s say between 768MB and 1 GB. But I still wonder what you need 768 MB for at home??

General idea is to make SWAP about double the size of RAM but in your case I think most probably your system will never need to swap.

good luck,

My RAM.

Well I started out with (2) 128's, but bought (2) additional modules of 256 ea before I learned to click on processes tab in task manager to see what was causing my cpu to jump to 100% (and stay there for a couple of minutes) every time I opened up a website or click on a link. Dummy me just looked at the performance tab and never clicked on processes. I later found out it was my Norton PF, not being configured correctly, causing the problem. Well, you live and learn, I did not need the additional RAM but I've always heard you can never have to much memory.

OK, so this is what I should do?

Logical 1, about 10G
Logical 2, about 1G
(I'll worry about 3 and 4 later and leave it as unallocated)

Now when I install Red Hat will it automatically know to install home on Logical 1 and Swap on 2 or will I have to tell installation where to install each?

Another question (I'm not going to say just 1 more question because I know I'll be asking more):

What is the differences between Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE? This is quite confusing to a newbie, Red Hat was my first option, probably because it was the first one I saw when searching but now I'm hearing about other Linux systems. Now I see each one comes in Personal or Professional, oh, decisions, decisions. I don't care about the cost but I do want a package the has some sort of office suite to make spreadsheets and do word processing. Can you guys recommend what I need?

Thanks.

More to confuse you... hopefully not!
 

Just caught your thread and thought I'ld throw my two cents worth in.

What do you intend to do with your box when it is up and running?

If you intend office workstation then you will need specific and reliably ongoing support so might I suggest RedHat. Select the package of your choice and go for it.

If you simply wish to set yourself up at home and have a look at linux to learn what is different from windows then get the latest Mandrake 9.1 release while you still can. I use it and I'm rapted.

I prefer to use Open Office 1.0.1 as my office suite, so you could include this in your installation. It is a very powerful suite.

When all said and done you must give yourself the time to learn the Linux way. Both the above come close to the "Windows Look and Feel" to get you started but you will soon discover that underneath lay some very powerful features that you'll enjoy getting to know.

You best bet here is to find (Via Search) some of the mini HowTo's that proliferate the net and take some time to read some of them.

PAY SPECIAL attention to installing Linux with a WinXP system. There are some specific rules here. I believe one of them may be that you will require a further windows partition at the end of your drive. [I'm only guessing here because I refuse to install WinXP.]

Wish you well in your new adventure and hope to see you back here skiteing like mad.

Re: Newbie needs help setting up
 

Have you tried looking at the "Linux+Windows HOWTO"? I've been reading through it. It's a little out-of-date so you'll probably need to post some questions about it (I have.. see my post in this forum), but it does address things such as partitioning, swap file size, etc, that will probably be of use to you also.

Hope this helps!

Shoot.. sorry about the double-post. Some of my comments got crossed with the quote. I'm still figuring out how this system works, and I must've fouled up the "bold" tag somewhere.. grr..