Before starting anything, I highly recommend you create a Win2K Emergency Rescue Disk. Also, at the end of the Mandrake installation, when it prompts you to create a Linux Boot Disk, I highly recommend you make one too.
Mandrake is fairly user friendly as far as Linux installations go. The Linux installations has a graphical interface (with mouse pointer and everything) which makes things less intimidating. As with installing most distributions of Linux, you will be presented with a HUGE list of packages that you wish to install. It’s fun to go through and select each individual package you want, but doing that may cause you to miss out on installing a certain package which you will then have to install later (which if you’ve never ever used Linux before, could take you a few hours to work out). I believe Mandrake has some pre-defined setups that you can choose from and I recommend going that way. Of course, if you have the space, a COMPLETE installation is probably your best bet.
As a suggestion from one newbie to another, when installing Linux do not NOT select the “compilation” and/or “programming” packages because you think you won’t be doing any programming. Even though you yourself won’t be doing any programming, many Linux programs will require the files, and also, any new Linux programs that you download and install may quite often require you to compile source code.
From memory, Mandrake successfully detected my Win2k installation and would have probably setted up LILO accordingly. However, I chose to use the Windows boot loader instead of LILO (because it looks better) so I went a different route. More explanation later below.
If you have free un-partitioned space on your existing HDD you can install Linux in that free space. If you don’t, you will have to make some free un-partitioned space (either by buying a new hard drive, using partition magic(??), or re-installing windows).
I’ve never used partition magic before so I don’t know. But I do know that the Mandrake installation cannot re-partition your existing windows partition for you, to the best of my knowledge.
This seems to be a “black magic” type area with many Linux users and it varies greatly depending on how you want to set up your computer or what you want to use your computer for. For myself, all I wanted was a single-user computer as similar to a windows setup as possible. From memory I made the following partitions:
1 ext3 partition for “/” (where Linux program files are stored)
1 ext3 partition for “/home” (where user’s personal diretories are stored)
1 ext3 partition for “/boot”
1 swap partition for “swap”
1 fat32 partition for “/storage” (not usual - my own setup - discussed further below)
I should make clear that I am not a Linux expert but, in my case,
“/” was about 5GB
“/home” was about 1.5GB
“/boot” was 100MB
“/storage” was a separate physical HDD so it was 10GB
“/swap” is dependent on your memory
Linux can read a FAT32 partition but not NTFS (athough i think there is a beta program out there somewhere which apparently has -some- success). Windows cannot read a Linus ext3 paritition and will in fact report the partition as being unformated and prompt you with a “Do you want to format this drive?” message. Make sure anyone using Windows on the same computer knows not to click “Yes”.
The reason why I made a 10GB FAT32 paritition was for the purpose of sharing files and programs between Windows and Linux. Quite a few windows programs and games work quite well in Linux using WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) and also saved documents (such as word/excel/etc) I save in this FAT32 partition so that I can accesss them regardless of which OS I boot.
During the Mandrake Installation, Mandrake will ask you if you wish for Mandrake to install a boot loader (LILO) and also where you want to install LILO (at the master boot record, or at the boot record of the drive Linux is installed on). This is a rather critical step and since I did not do it the conventional way I will let someone else give the advice here. Instead, I will describe what I did.
I wanted to use the Windows boot loader instead of LILO because I felt it looked better. There are fairly detailed instructions on the net on how to do this but here’s a brief summary.
- Install Mandrake as per usual
- When prompted, do NOT get Mandrake to install a boot loader.
- Make a Linux boot disk
- Finish Mandrake installation
- Restart computer
- Computer will boot into Win2k only (you will not be able to access your linux OS)
- Check that windows is okay
- Restart computer, this time with Linux Boot Disk in the floppy drive.
- Linux should boot up
- Make sure Linux is okay.
- You now need to make a copy of the first sector of your native root Linux partition: (***warning)
11a) Mount a floppy (mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy)
11b)In a terminal window:
dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/mnt/floppy/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1
NB: hda2 should be replaced with the identifier of the partition in which you installed Linux. (i.e. hda1, hdb1, hda2, hdb2, or whatever)
11c) You’re done
12) Reboot computer (computer will still boot into windows only)
13) Go to your C:
14) Copy bootsect.lnx from your A: to your C:
15) Edit the file C:\Boot.ini
16) Add the following line to the end of it:
C:\bootsect.lnx=“Mandrake Linux 9.1 - Penguin Power”
- Reboot computer. You should now see a boot menu letting you choose whether to boot Win2k or Linux. Test that you are able to boot Linux
- Congrats.
***warning:
I’m a Linux newb, and I can’t remember whether you copy the first sector of “/” or the first sector of “/boot” so what i did was I copied both and named them boosect1.lnx and bootsect2.lnx. Then I copied both to C: and added two new lines in boot.ini (one for each file) and then see which one made Linux boot and which one didn’t. :rolleyes: