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Old 05-11-2006, 05:02 AM   #1
punksoul257
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Cool Hello guys, feel free to point and laugh @ the n00b :D


Just thought i'd say hi to all you forum goers.
I'm a complete n00b when it comes to linux (of any description)
For the past few weeks i've been toying with Live-cd's (DSL, Slax) & i've decided to make Linux a bit more permenant on my system.

Currently running on XP Pro, just downloaded Slackware 10.2. I'm learning as i go along.

A word of warning, expect many confused posts.

I am currently running :-

Athlon XP 2.0
512mb DDR PC3200
Radeon 8500
SB! Audigy 1
C: 40gb IDE HD (windows)
D: 60gb IDE HD (slackware, once installed)
G: 160gb USB HD (random storage)

I didn't have much in the way of trouble when running Slax, i am praying it'll be more of the same when installing Slackware 10.2. If it all goes wrong your allowed to point & laugh I didn't want a seperate partition on my C: incase i totally mucked it up, & knowing my luck & lack of knowledge of linux, i probably would.

Last edited by punksoul257; 05-11-2006 at 05:39 AM.
 
Old 05-11-2006, 06:11 AM   #2
Randux
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Hey man, if you read this forum you will quickly find that Slackware has one of the best if not the best user communities in Linuxland. We all help each other out as much as we can, and it's one of the things that keeps Slackware the best Linux distro.

It sounds like you started out right by running LiveCDs. A lot of people jump in and install Redhat or another big distro without ever having tried it out. It is better if you can try a variety of distros and pick one you like.

I would point out that you have plenty of disk storage on your machine and it might be worthwhile to plan ahead a little and think what you might like to run on it. You can certainly share the first drive with more Linuces depending on how big your winblows setup is and how big you want it to be able to get. Slackware is a fairly lean distro and you can make a nice desktop in 5G plus maybe 1G for /home. You can share swap (and it probably shouldn't be bigger than 256M with your setup.)

There are a lot of good threads on partitioning; it's one of the important parts of planning for and setting up a Linux distro. You also should consider whether you might want to run *BSD or Solaris because these should be installed in a primary partition and this will also affect your setup. I'm sorry I can't point to any partitioning threads, I don't have them bookmarked.

It's easy to multiboot and install multiple OS on one drive. It's also easy to toast all your data if you don't plan ahead and understand what you're doing. There are also many helpful threads on this (and unfortunately some confusing ones also) so read, ask questions, and read again. It's a lot easier to ask how you should do something before you do it than it is to ask how do I recover after I {deleted my partition table, overwrote my NTFS filesystem, trashed my winbloze bootloader}


Last edited by Randux; 05-11-2006 at 06:16 AM.
 
Old 05-11-2006, 06:26 AM   #3
punksoul257
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My winblows takes up quite a bit of space on my C: which is why i want a seperate drive for Slackware. My little 40gb drive is near enough full thanks to bit torrent & various other programs/games.

As i said, i've tried DSL & Slax Live-Cd's. I really liked the layout of Slax & felt it was a bit more user friendly then the DSL one. This is probably still very much down to the fact i don't have a clue whats going on when it comes to Linux.
At the moment, my D: is partitioned & formatted ready for Linux, i have my USB-Wifi drivers on a floppy ready, i'm not sure about my gcard/soundcard drivers. Whats that about a swap file? Is that like allocated space for "virual memory".

What i was planning on doing was installing it streight to D: then when i wanted to use it changing the BIOS to boot up from the D: instead of the C:, i know its fiddly but i have this unusual god given gift of mucking things up just by looking at them.

Oh yeah, probably not made it clear but i've been a Winblows user for @ least 10 years (from dos/win 3.11/95/98/me/2k & XP), i fancy a bit of a change, expand my horisons & learn a few things & the fact i finally want a legit OS that also works.
 
Old 05-11-2006, 06:39 AM   #4
Randux
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Quote:
Originally Posted by punksoul257
As i said, i've tried DSL & Slax Live-Cd's. I really liked the layout of Slax & felt it was a bit more user friendly then the DSL one.
It's not really an apples and apples comparison, depending on which Slax you ran. The normal Slax desktop is pretty much a full KDE desktop and is representative of a normal desktop installation. They deliberately use KDE as it's very easy for Win users to learn without difficulty. DSL is a minimalist distro using a light window manager and is great as a repair or emergency distro and for use on older PCs or ones without much processor or RAM. Comparing these two is sort of like comparing a caravan to an army tent

Quote:
Originally Posted by punksoul257
At the moment, my D: is partitioned & formatted ready for Linux, i have my USB-Wifi drivers on a floppy ready, i'm not sure about my gcard/soundcard drivers. Whats that about a swap file? Is that like allocated space for "virual memory".
How did you partition and format your drive for Linux?

Yes, the swap file is a type of virtual memory. But because of the efficiency of the kernel and the amount of RAM available on modern PCs, swap is almost never used. To avoid wasting too much space and for emergency use, you should create it at 256M (configuring a separate logical partition is best) and not waste a half gig or more as some people do.

Quote:
Originally Posted by punksoul257
What i was planning on doing was installing it streight to D: then when i wanted to use it changing the BIOS to boot up from the D: instead of the C:, i know its fiddly but i have this unusual god given gift of mucking things up just by looking at them.
That's fine if your BIOS will support it. Usually you just configure Lilo with entries for all your systems and install it in the MBR of the primary drive. It can locate things on other drives from there and no BIOS settings are required.

Last edited by Randux; 05-11-2006 at 10:49 AM.
 
Old 05-11-2006, 08:16 AM   #5
punksoul257
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Randux
How did you partition and format your drive for Linux?
I used the command prompt within Slax & i put mkfs.ext2 /dev/hdc1

Yeah i kinda gathered compairing DSL & Slax a bit daft, DSL was my first experience of Linux, thats where i caught the bug from.

Oh yeah, just a quick q.

Where do i place the .ini file for my USB wifi drivers. I've got it on a floppy & also on my D: I want to add it to my slax boot up so i don't have to use my XBOX ethernet adaptor.

Last edited by punksoul257; 05-11-2006 at 08:19 AM.
 
Old 05-11-2006, 08:19 AM   #6
piete
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Firstly, welcome to Linux & Slackware!

Just to add to Randux's comments (as helpful as always, Randux!) I'd like to be pedantic and say:

Quote:
Even so, you still have to create one, [swap drive]
This is incorrect. It's optional. I will not confuse the matter further by discussing here, just wanted to debunk that myth quickly!

I feel confident in saying that I am getting a bit of reputation for patronising posts, I realise this and have come to terms with it. If you know all of what's coming below, I'm sorry. If you don't, I suggest you read it through, do some reading around on the topic (the slackbook is pretty good) and then come back and see if it all makes sense =D

So on with the show! I'd like to briefly explain the nomenclature used in Linux for hard disks & partitions, so you can get support quicker and can understand the threads on this forum better when running your own searches =)

Windows displays partitions and gives them a letter of the alphabet You know this. Because of the use of the word "drive", it can be easy for people to get confused between physical hard drive and the logical separation of portions of one hard drive (partition).

No such problem with Linux, thankfully. Firstly new partitions aren't given some high-level entity representation, they're merely mounted under the root directory tree (a windows equivalent would be to locate the contents of Documents & Settings on a different partition and mount it under the c:\Documents & Settings - the root tree). So, usually you're looking at a structure like:

Code:
[ \ ] - C:
  |
  |---> \boot - just a directory under \
  |---> \home - a different partition
  |---> \usr  - some other partition
  \---> \usr\local - a directory located on the \usr partition
That's all a bit clumsy - let's give this lot some names.

hd* is the standard abbreviation for IDE devices.

hda = primary master
hdb = primary slave
hdc = secondary master
hdd = secondary slave

And what about sata and usb? They end up with: sd* - which i believe is short for SCSI disk (I might be making that up, don't quote me) and stems from their roots with that particular subsystem.

In my case, I have 1 sata drive, so end up with a /dev/sda device. When I plug in my usb stick, I get a /dev/sdb and so on ... a friend of mine likes raid, and on plugging my stick in had an sdg

So how does that help? Well, if you attach a number to those devices, you'll get a partition.

hda1 = first partition (of type primary) on the primary master ide channel. Windows calls this C: most often.
hdc5 = a logical partition (1 - 4 reserved for primary types) on the secondary master ide channel.

When taken with out diagram previously, we can explain *exactly* how the structure looks with no misunderstandings.

Code:
[ \ ] - hda1
  |
  |---> \boot - just a directory
  |---> \home - mounted from hdb1 (this might be a data drive or similar)
  |---> \usr  - hda2 (this is so you can reinstall root without touching \usr should you want to!)
  \---> \usr\local - a directory located on the \usr partition (hda2)
So we have <device>{partition number} nomenclature for describing what's in our systems. IDE cdroms and dvd drives use the same stuff - you'll find your cd drive located at somewhere like /dev/hdb (primary slave) - since it has no partitions, it's just a device =)

Hope this helps a little,
- Piete.

PS: While windows keeps a swap *file* on C: (and you can do the same under Linux I think), typically Linux distros want to reserves a whole partition for it. It doesn't matter where you put it, either in a primary partition or a logical-extended partition. With 512mb of ram you will be fine with 256swap - even that might be overkill. I personally go mad and double my ram (512ram, 1G swap) but I don't think I've ever used more than 100mb of that.
 
Old 05-11-2006, 08:58 AM   #7
punksoul257
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piete, you've just completely boggled me :P but i think i kinda understand at the same time.
 
Old 05-11-2006, 09:58 AM   #8
Randux
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Thumbs up

Quote:
Originally Posted by piete
This is incorrect. It's optional. I will not confuse the matter further by discussing here, just wanted to debunk that myth quickly!
Perhaps I overgeneralized; I was under this impression because I recall all of the linux installers not making this step optional. Maybe I didn't even remember this part correctly! Thanks for the correction.

Rand

Edit: Piete is indeed (as per usual!) quite correct. I disabled swap, removed it from fstab, and the system comes up cleanly. TOP shows no swap available. Sorry for the confusion. I'm removing the statement from the earlier post to avoid confusing anyone further, and anyone else can just ignore this post if it doesn't make sense

Last edited by Randux; 05-11-2006 at 10:47 AM.
 
Old 05-11-2006, 10:04 AM   #9
punksoul257
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remember i'm new to this

You made my brain hurt
 
Old 05-11-2006, 10:59 AM   #10
raska
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Quote:
Originally Posted by piete
........I personally go mad and double my ram (512ram, 1G swap) but I don't think I've ever used more than 100mb of that.
LOL me too

my desktop machine's swap is about 3.5 Gb total, scattered through 2 hard drives which makes swapping faster (as in RAID 0). Though it has 2 gigs of RAM... I have never seen it touch the swap, not even when playing heavy games (UT2004, Doom3, Quake4). So much swap became from the idea of once getting the suspend-to-ram thing working but I have had not any spare time.

punksoul257: keep up man, don't be afraid of asking whatever doubt comes to you. There is a whole new world to discover. You might screw up things in order to learn, though it's natural; happens to everyone. Once you get expertise and feel like fish in the water using Linux, you won't go back to windoze

"Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else"

...I should put that one on my sig...
 
Old 05-12-2006, 04:04 AM   #11
punksoul257
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Well i've managed to get Slackware 10.2 installed without a hitch, gonna try to sort out some of the other bits tonight when i get in from work. e.g. USB Wifi adaptor & Soundcard.
 
  


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