I have winxp with 2 hard drives. 1 has winxp on it with 30G (C:/)and the other has 80G with only 15G used on it (F:/) which is the slave drive.

both are formatted with ntfs.

Can I partition the 2nd HD 'F drive' so I can fit linux on it. I would need about 20G of it.
Do I need to wipe it clean 'F drive' before I partition it or what can I do. It has software on it already that I prefer not to change.

you can parition F:/ without wiping it clean, but it would be wise to defrag that drive first

Yep, just resize the ntfs partition on that drive to create enough free space, then create the Linux partitions you need. You will want a minimum of 2 partitions for Linux. 1 should be around 1GB for swap, and then the rest for the root partition.

Hi

how do i resize the partition (which has over 80%free space) and i have defraged the drive?

Download and burn a Gparted LiveCD iso. It can resize ntfs partitions as well as create linux partitions. It is a good idea to make three:
1 for swap (= 2 x the size of your RAM with a maximum of 2GB)
1 which will hold your / partition (8 to 10 GB should be fine for most distributions)
1 for your home partition (as large as you want it to be) for your personal data

Ok I downloaded gparted iso.

Now i need to download linux. To do this what is more popular these days Suse or Redhat? and can i downlaod either for free?

Well, both Suse and Red Hat are commercial products but there are free version as well: in the case of Suse, it's called openSuse, in the case of Red Hat, it's called Fedora (there is CentOS as well). You can get more ideas from a site like distrowatch.com or yolinux.com. And don't forger Ubuntu, Debian or Mandriva - those are very popular too.

Any of those should be fine, really. And perhaps Ubuntu is the easiest one to start with but the other ones are really close. If you want to restrict yourself to openSuse and Fedora, my own choice would be Fedora - if only because Fedora tends to have more community support and there are many more online Fedora guides than there are openSuse equivalents.

Anyway,they are all free so you can download and install all five or six if you feel like it and you have the space to spare.

Well why limit yourself ?

Personally, I'd suggest 3 partitons. One for the / (a.k.a. root), one for swap and one for /home. The seperate /home has the advantage, that because you're new to linux, you can start doing stuff i.e. setting up address books for emai, customistation, bookmark lists etc etc (you know, the normal stuff we often do without thinking), but if you get adventurous and want to try a different distro, as long as you don't touch the /home during install of a different distro (formating the partition etc etc.) then as long as the installer for the new distro see's the partition, it invariably "just works".

As for which distro ? Well if you're familiar with windows, then I would suggest one that uses the KDE graphical frontend. Not because it's necessarily better or worse than gnome, but because it feels a little more "windows like" and less different (which I personally prefer, because thats what I "cut my teeth" with). So if you wanted to go with whats popular, either Ubuntu, but then installing the KDE desktop or just go for Kubuntu (which is Ubuntu with the KDE already installed/configured).

Being part of the *buntu world, theres a mountain of assistance/help/guidance etc already available for it.

Oh and if it were my system with say 60 gig's available, then I'd make the / partition 15 to 20 gigs, the /swap 2x the installed RAM (thats from the traditional linux wisdom when 64 megs of RAM was a lot, unlike what people tend to have installed these days - my /swap is 1.5 gigs, with is roughly 2x the 768 megs of RAM I have installed) and the rest for the /home. That would allow me enough space to play with installing just about all the linux apps I might ever want to use in the /, while having plenty of space for user type stuff (music etc etc) in the /home.

Oh and with the gparted, I would suggest at very least, formatting the partitions as ext3 (you'd have to google for explainations of the pro's and cons of other file systems).

If you think it's likely that you'll want/need to have a facility to be able to write stuff to files in both OS, then it might be prudent to have a seperate partition thats formatted as FAT32, neither OS has a problem writing files in that file system - whereas, there are still some issues about linux writing files in NTFS.

regards

John

Hi,

Thanks for the advice.
I will have about 20G to play with

Now all I want is a version that has a lot of community help with.

If that is Fedora then i will get that.
NOw I need 3 partitions for this I take it
1 /swap
1/ home
1 /

The opsenSuse download failed with DVD icon on the site.

I have a dvd writer so i dont want 6 cd's.

I have a fast internet and want to download say fedora. I have a i386 .

Now from the mirrors I say loads of choices from ftp sites eg fedora or everything ,i have no idea ? What am I looking for.

What exactly to I download eg which .iso?

fedora7 i386 .iso

it is 2.7g to download and it stopped after 100mb saying it coudn't read file.

This is hard to download?

http://ftp.univie.ac.at/systems/linu...dora/i386/iso/

I downloaded bittorrent and used that. It is at a speed of 5kbs-10kbs so it will take 9 days?

If your download failed just try a different mirror.

I used a download manager and i get 50-100kbs.

Do i need to burn the image at a slow speed as i did it at 48X. I have nero 7 and i have 2 speeds listed only 48 and fast.

Also when i boot up with gparted I get range of options with the keyboard and nothing like what it says in the help docs? What is it I start with ?

I want to make a 80G partition into a 60G and leave 20 for linux

I can get into gparted .

How do i setup the partitions for linux with this exactly

/
/home
/swap
but can i use the install linux iso

Also how can i check the download with SHA1SUM as no file appears to download, I just get the text output when clicking on it.

It took ages to download and i didnt know forward port for my smc rounter. The problem is there are many ways to do this so i havent a clue where to start or if it is safe on current interent link.