A couple of Ubuntu questions.

Factual Questions
1

There have been several threads on Ubuntu lately, and I looked at those before I decided to post those. So if these questions have already been answered, please link me to the correct thread.

Anyway, I’ve gotten bored, and have decided to set up my computer as a dual boot machine with XP and Ubuntu. Since I have an AMD Athlon64 FX-62 processor, I downloaded the 64 bit DVD version of Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft). My first question is, what are the differences between:

[ul]
[li]DVD version of Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) (3.5GB .iso file)[/li][li]CD version of Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) (690MB .iso file)[/li][li]Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) (699MB .iso file)?[/li][/ul]
My second question has to do with partitioning. My drive is currently divided into two partitions. I plan on backing up what I need to the second partition, and creating the Ubuntu partition from the first partition. Now, I don’t think that will affect, the second partition, but I could be wrong. Would it be safer to back up the data to an external hard drive?

Thanks in advance to any information you can give me or point me to.

cf’75

2

The DVD contains more extra software than the CD. Other than that they’re the same version of the same OS, so all of the essentials are going to be the same. 6.06 is the last stable version and is going to be supported (with repositories and such) for a long time, but if upgrading is easy for you (and if you have broadband it is) 6.10 should be very good for you due to all of the more advanced software.

Backing up to external media is a good idea anyway. That said, it is not essential unless you somehow screw up partitioning (blast one that’s essential). I like the following partition scheme:
[ul]
[li]Leave the Windows partitions alone except to make room for the new Linux partitions. This is to avoid pissing off Windows, an OS you can’t really fix.[/li][li]A partition to mount / (root) on. This is where the OS itself and all of its essential files live. This is controlled by Synaptic and is sacred to its rites. (Seriously, your life gets a lot easier if you leave most directories under / alone.)[/li][li]A partition to mount /usr/local on. This is where programs you install from source will live. Synaptic doesn’t care what goes on here and will not help or hinder you.[/li][li]A partition to mount /home on. This is where your personal files live. Synaptic also doesn’t care about this space and will leave it alone, but the default user add process makes a directory under /home named the same as your login name. This is relied upon by many other programs.[/li][li]Maybe a partition to mount /tmp on. This is where scratch files created by some programs live, typically ones that get deleted rather quickly. For one person, it probably isn’t essential /tmp lives on its own partition. For a corporate server or other publically-accessable machine, a moron or vandal could ruin the sysadmin’s day by flooding /tmp if it also meant eating up all space on /. A separate partition for /tmp foils that plan.[/li][/ul]That plan makes for maximum flexibility if you ever want to install another kind of Linux or want to make backups by simply dumping partitions over to other hard drives. (This is really simple in Linux.) Partitioning your hard drive has gotten really easy with Linux installers recently, and Ubuntu sports a good one.

3

Thanks Derleth.

Just out of curiosity, how big do you make your Linux partitions?

cf’75

4

I completely spaced on something I should have told you last night, although the installation process will mention it as well: Make a swap partition. It should be about half the amount of physical RAM you have installed. I have 1 gig of RAM, so my swap partition is half that size (500 megs). It isn’t very big, but it has a huge impact on performance.

Out of an 80 gig drive on my laptop, 6.8 gigs is used for the root partition, 29 gigs for /home, and 9.7 gigs for /usr/local. My main Windows partition is 22 gigs, which is probably too big but resizing NTFS partitions is still somewhat touchy. Make sure you defragment all your Windows partitions (NTFS and VFAT) before resizing them.

5

I, too, have been contemplating a switch to Ubuntu. I ran the live CD (6.06) on my computer today and it looks good. Didn’t recognize my second monitor, but i guess i need to get Linux drivers for my video card.

Anyway, Linux won’t write to NTFS, right? So i need to make the partitions you discussed above, and also make the Linux partitions non-NTFS (FAT32?).

I have two hard drives on my computer (2 x 160Gb SATA).

If i want a dual-boot system for the moment, would it be easiest just to make one hard drive a Windows NTFS drive, and use the other for Ubuntu?

6

[QUOTE=mhendo]
I, too, have been contemplating a switch to Ubuntu. I ran the live CD (6.06) on my computer today and it looks good. Didn’t recognize my second monitor, but i guess i need to get Linux drivers for my video card.

Anyway, Linux won’t write to NTFS, right? So i need to make the partitions you discussed above, and also make the Linux partitions non-NTFS (FAT32?).

I have two hard drives on my computer (2 x 160Gb SATA).

If i want a dual-boot system for the moment, would it be easiest just to make one hard drive a Windows NTFS drive, and use the other for Ubuntu?
[/QUOTE]

what kind of graphics card do you have? If you have nvidia, you are in luck! Nvidia drivers for linux are above average. If you have ATI… Then well… Things get more interesting… (there are lots of articles on the ubuntu forums and elsewhere to install the drivers. Google should help you there).

Linux CAN write to NTFS, but it is not recommended under any circumstances. The reason being: NTFS is a proprietary file format. In order for Linux to even read the data on NTFS partitions, they had to reverse engineer the format. Even with all this time, it is still not 100%, and as such if you try to write to an NTFS formatted drive, you are going to run into massive file corruption and deletion. Best not to try. Reading from an NTFS drive though is perfectly legit.

You also cannot use FAT32 for the Linux partitions. Ubuntu will provide you with a multitude of options for what format to use. Most people tend to use ext3, ext2, or reiserfs, in that order. Since Linux cannot use FAT32 or NTFS, this creates problems for moving files back and forth as mentioned above. Again, it is simple to move files from Windows to Linux. Not so much in the other direction (there are freeware programs that allow you to circumvent this issue as well).

Finally:

Yes and no. I have installed now, about a dozen different flavors of linux, and many, many times reinstalled windows. The problem with doing an install of Ubuntu on one hard drive, and Windows on another, is that depending on how your computer is configured in terms of boot priority, either Ubuntu’s boot up manager, or Window’s boot up manager will be prioritized. Now, the problem is, its a royal PITA to get Windows’ boot manager to recognize a Linux machine, and unless you know what you’re doing its going to be difficult to configure the Linux boot manager (GRUB or LILO). (Ubuntu comes with GRUB).

The best way to configure it would be to have the / partition and the swap partition on the same drive as Windows. Put your /home partition on the other hard drive. All of your files that you download will be put on your /home partition. This also provides you with the beauty that if your main drive fails, you do not lose all of your data.

That is not to say that it cannot be done though. Just initially, I would not recommend trying to force GRUB to boot and see Windows, until you get a little more comfortable with Linux in general. It’s a great OS BTW.

7

[QUOTE=TimeWarp]
Linux CAN write to NTFS, but it is not recommended under any circumstances. The reason being: NTFS is a proprietary file format. In order for Linux to even read the data on NTFS partitions, they had to reverse engineer the format. Even with all this time, it is still not 100%, and as such if you try to write to an NTFS formatted drive, you are going to run into massive file corruption and deletion. Best not to try. Reading from an NTFS drive though is perfectly legit.
[/QUOTE]
The NTFS-3G FUSE file system drivers are much better than TimeWarp indicates. They won’t corrupt data, and just fail in certain edge cases. They are the standard for current distributions. Also, they always write files as owner Admin, no permission inheritance.

That said, I would stick with NTFS for windows partitions and install the ext2 file system driver for Windows - then you can read/write your Linux partitions from Windows and your Windows partitions from Linux. Use FAT32 for detachable media you want to use on both.

For your setup, I would have a Windows boot/system partition (normal c: drive) and Linux /boot(this is the bootable kernel, boot manager etc) , /swap and / (actual os programs) partitions on the first drive, and Windows userdata (Documents and Settings) and /home on the second drive.
This keeps all your personal data safe and isolated from the OS/Programs stuff.

In your case

Disk 1
80Gb Windows partition (NTFS) Normal Windows setup
1 Gb /boot (ext3)
78 Gb / (ext3)
1 Gb /swap (swap)

Disk 2
80Gb Windows partition (NTFS) Documents and Settings
80Gb /home

Si

8

[QUOTE=mhendo]
I, too, have been contemplating a switch to Ubuntu. I ran the live CD (6.06) on my computer today and it looks good. Didn’t recognize my second monitor, but i guess i need to get Linux drivers for my video card.
[/QUOTE]
That can be a tricky issue; some cards have better support than others in Linux - you might want to check that your brand and model of card has fully functional Linux drivers before making the switch.

9

Linux can’t write to NTFS for most practical intents and purposes. Writing to NTFS from Linux is riskier behavior than I am willing to engage in with my data, anyway.

Linux can write to FAT32 just fine, so you can have a few FAT32 partitions and use them to move files between Windows and Linux (copy a file from a Linux directory to the partition, then the next time you boot Windows the file will show up in that partition). I know XP installs a few FAT32 partitions by default, so you can use those.

As for native Linux partitions, use ext3 or reiserfs. ext2 is usable, but it isn’t journaled so file system checks take longer and there is a higher risk of losing data if you get hit with a power outage or something and can’t shut down cleanly. reiserfs is a much more advanced file system all around and it works just fine from what I hear, but it is newer and it therefore comes with somewhat higher risks. I universally use ext3.

10

In view of this thread I decided to try the Live CD of Ubuntu. I downloaded version 6.1 of Ubuntu then discovered that I needed Infra Recorder. So I downloaded that too. Then it said needed winMD5Sum which I also downloaded

Then I got stuck because the instructions didn’t make any sense to me (I’m pretty inexperienced at all this). Now I read that monitors and internet connections might not work.

In view of my useless pc ability is it really worth me persevering or am I going to hit the big problem that I can’t get round?

I was under the impression that everything you needed was on the Live CD.

11

The MD5sum thing is just a way of checking that the ISO file you have downloaded is complete and unaltered. I’ve never bothered with it; just download the .iso, burn it to a CD using CDBurnerXP or DeepBurner (if you don’t already have Nero or something), then boot from it.

12

Thanks for the advice, everyone.

My graphics card is an nVidia GeForce FX5200, and a quick browse of the Ubuntu forums suggests that most people manage to get it working pretty easily.

13

Thanks for the information, everybody. I now have another question.

I’m now ready to resize/create my partitions. I’m using GParted. I’m unsure exactly how to go about doing this. The menu looks like this:

          Minimum Size: 26632 MiB           Maximum Size: 224996 MiB

          Free Space Preceding (MiB):  0 (grayed out, and can't change)

          New Size (MiB):  224996 (can be changed)

          Free Space Following (MiB):  0 (can be changed, taken from New Size)

Now, the partition I’m changing (Windows) is listed as 219.72GiB total, and 193.73GiB unused. How do I change this to allow me to take away 75 gigs from this partition to use for my Linux partitions?

If you need more information, please let me know. Thanks again everybody.

cf’75

14

Just a bump to try to get this question answered.

Thanks again everybody.

cf’75

15

[QUOTE=cardsfan1975]

New Size (MiB): 224996 (can be changed)

Free Space Following (MiB): 0 (can be changed, taken from New Size)
How do I change this to allow me to take away 75 gigs from this partition to use for my Linux partitions?
[/QUOTE]

set the New Size following to 149996 (224996 - 75000)

Si