[Kazan]

The Bad: My new laptops 12GB harddrive died, and i lost paid work (woohoo get to rewrite it and be paid twice)

The Good: Still under warranty, new 20GB harddrive coming free.  All Ferrium code was already backed up into the CVS

The Cool: I can still use the laptop right now even with no harddrive in it.  Knoppix is your friend.

[redsniper]

great?

[mikhael]

Excellent stuff, Kaz.

[kasperl]

Knoppix is lovely, getting a better HD through garantuee is just perfect and doing paid work twice for wtice the pay doesn't sound too bad.

[Nico]

knoppix?

[kasperl]

Knoppix, the most sacred of solutions to disk problems.

a linux-on-a-cd distro, run a google, dl 700 megs, burn to a disc, put it in storage, love it when your HD has a problem. it has it's own CD bring util, fully working internet and office suits, the Gimp (ps clone), and it can read NTFS. it can off course also read and write FAT and alomst anything you can think of.

[Nico]

Ah, linux.

[Taristin]

Sounds wonderful. Too bad I don't run linux.

[CP5670]

Knoppix is indeed really nice. It was a lifesaver for me at one point when my old hard drive was slowly tearing itself apart; my last backup was rather old and although most of the important files were still readable at that point, the Windows directory clusters had been hosed and so I couldn't load up a CD writer program to backup stuff. Knoppix worked perfectly here, although my warranty had expired and I had to buy a new HDD.

[Taristin]

Do you need to have linux installed to use it? Or am I understanding it'll run directly off a disk?

[karajorma]

Directly off of a CD

[Kazan]

it runs directly from the CD - if you have any MSDOS partitions i would recommend allowing it to setup a swap file if you have <256MB of ram (it just creates a file on said MSDOS partition, you can later delete said file)

[Nuke]

linux rules. i wanted to set up a dualboot with linux, but im too impatient to download it, even with a 1 megabit connection.

[Bobboau]

were would be a good site for getting started with linux, I have my disk set up with a FAT32 partition just waiting for it.

[Kazan]

FAT32 is NOT the linux filesystem -- ext2 [and ext3] is the linux filesystem and then you have a swap partition

(Linux can read/write (v)fat partitions just fine, but it cannot live on them without using UMSDOS which is.. dirty)

[ext2/ext3 Size-512mb][Swap 512mb] (well.. pick your swap size)

A good distro is Fedora, http://fedora.redhat.com (Fedora is the most linux-newbie friendly distro)

There is no single site, it's mostly RTFM and "[What you want to do] HOWTO]" - such as "Networking HOWTO", "CD BURNING HOWTO", etc

[Bobboau]

so I need two partitions for linux?

[Kazan]

yes -- the install process for fedora has a graphical partitioner (i recommend you do manual partitioning in disk druid since you have expirience with partitions - i don't know what the automagic partitioner does and i don't trust it)

the reason why you need two linux partitions is they put swap on it's own seperate partition with a special filesystem for opitization reasons

[Bobboau]

will the > 2 gig I set asside be large enough?
am I going to have to reinstall windows again?
do I have to worry about the large storage partition I made on the primary hdd be ok (other than the fact that it's NTFS, my secondary drive (were most of my importan stuff is) is FAT32)?

[HellToupee]

ya knoppix is great when i lost my harddrive with my debian linux install on it, i just said fuk it got knoppix and was running again with the same stuff in half the time .

For partitioning knoppix has good software for it, qtparted front end for parted can resize ntfs fat32 relativly safely and can easly create the linux partitions you need. Mepis much like knoppix is also a very good live cd, with its own control center thing a bit like what mandrake has comes with nvidia drivers and more geared towards installing, tho they have no idea what eye candy is.

[Kamikaze]

Originally posted by Bobboau
will the > 2 gig I set asside be large enough?
am I going to have to reinstall windows again?
do I have to worry about the large storage partition I made on the primary hdd be ok (other than the fact that it's NTFS, my secondary drive (were most of my importan stuff is) is FAT32)?

The 2 gig will probably be fine, but keep in mind you want 1-2x your RAM for swap. If you use a modern Linux distro you shouldn't have to worry about screwing over your current stuff, if your Windows partition takes up the whole hard drive you can resize it in the installer (that's if you use Mandrake, my recommended n00b distro).

For filesystems there are plenty of choices, the standard two are ext2 (probably should use this for /boot and /tmp, that's only if you're using more than two partitions) and ext3. Ext3 is a journaling file system and you probably should use it instead of ext2 for a two partition setup. There's also reiserfs (journaling file system, fast but may use more processing power than others), and xfs (journaling). There're a bunch more supported but they aren't used much.

By the way, don't try to write to your NTFS drive unless you're using kernel 2.6 (NTFS writing is probably disabled anyway in default kernels) or Knoppix.