[NTLUG:Discuss] Installation learning curve

[Allen Meyers]

Ralph

  I sincerly thank you for that most informative response. You filled in a number of gaps in my hesitant decision making
   
  Allen

Ralph <sfreader at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
  Howdy,
I interleaved my answers with your questions. I don't know what that
is called. This is not bottom posting, is it?

On Fri, 2008-07-11 at 13:40 -0500, Allen Meyers wrote:
> Is there an advantage to installation without partitioning?
It saves you the trouble of partitioning.

> If partitioning is the decision does one need more then 1 if one has in 
> excess of 1GB of RAM
I have read this question addressed to the kernel(The lowest part and
the part that is truly Linux) mailing list. They recommend you always
set up a swap, if you can. Most often, a swap is a partition, but it
can be a swap file.

> Finally is colinux a viable option over partitioning and all of this from 
For some people. It really depend on what you are trying to
accomplish. If you are new and just want to try Linux without changing
you machine setup, I would recommend you use one of the Live CDs. These
are Linux distros that boot and run from a CD or DVD and require no
changes to your computer. If you hard drive is a NTFS filesystem, I'd
recommend you install a USB pen drive and save files to that when you
use Linux. That is because NTFS is an undocumented file format and
Linux has some trouble writing to it. There are ways for Linux to
safely write to a NTFS partition, but they are out of the scope of a
beginner, I think. Knoppix is the Sine qua non of the Live CDs. If you
don't have some reason to pick another one, start with it. You can
download it for free at http://www.knoppix.org/ Click on the combined
American/English flag, if you want to change the website to English.

> the perspective of a new user.
> 
Once you decide you want to use Linux, start small. Set aside 10 gig
of your hard drive. Shrink your windows partitions a bit to get that.
Put a 512 meg swap in one partition and make the rest your root (or /)
partition. Let the Linux install install a boot manager and then when
you boot your system, you get to choose whether to run your current os
or Linux.

Give Linux a little time, and you may grow to like it. I hated it at
first, because Linux does so many things different from the way I was
used to in Windows. After using Linux for a while, you begin to
understand the reasons and now I am much more productive and happy using
Linux than any other OS.

Good luck,
Ralph



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    Allen Meyers
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