Help liberate me from Windows!!

Factual Questions
1

Being curious about something other then Windows for quite some time, I decided a few days ago to do some research and see what Linux is about. After some reading, I decided to go with RedHat 7.3, which seems to have tons of documentation, and is generally (at least the gist I got) the most stable and user friendly version.

I’m not the most technical guy in the world, but I can follow instructions, so shouldn’t be a problem right?

  1. Download the Iso ( 3 disks, got it)

  2. Run md5 checksum

    2a. ????
2b. Google to find out wtf md5 is
2c.  Download app
2d. Run, iso are all fine

  3. Starting to feel like I’m in over my head

Here’s the deal

Dell p3 600mhz, Win98, 2 drives, 20 gig C, 40 gig D.

My intentions are to repartition D into 20 gig for Win, 20 gig for Linux.

My fears are that I will nuke everything. The catch is I need to make sure that if I screw this up, my Windows will not be affected in any way shape or form. I feel it’s less risky because I am installing on a blank D drive, but while I was trying to seek info on dual boot systems I read some real horror stories. I need some advice, or a smack in the head.

What should I do. I started reading about RPMs and my eyes glazed over. Linux ain’t as user friendly as they spin it.

As always, thanks in advance.

2

2a. is actually the step just before big profit.

3

Linux is a form of unix, and the old joke goes that “unix is very user friendly, it’s just particular about who its friends are.” Linux has gotten a lot more user friendly over the years, but its still a bit away from the point and click windows stuff.

I always use slackware instead of redhat (only because I’ve been using slackware since it was just about the only distribution you could get, long before redhat came along). No matter what distribution you use, you end up doing basically the same things.

The least risky thing to do with your D drive is save all your stuff somewhere, wipe the disk, and repartition it, format half of it, then put your windows stuff back on it. Just leave the rest of the disk unpartitioned until you put linux on it. Linux really needs a root and a swap partition. Redhat may want to set up other partitions for you. Do whatever is easiest to do in redhat, but all you really need is a main linux partition and a swap partition. The swap partition should be at least double your physical ram size, and probably doesn’t need to be much bigger than that. The main linux partition can take up the rest of the free space on the disk.

You can try to repartition your drive without saving everything off of it. This can be a little risky but most of the time it works.

In slackware and debian you create boot disks, then once you boot from these you install from the CD. I imagine redhat is similar. Then once linux is all installed you get to configure it, and this is where redhat differs from some of the other versions. It has a lot of its own configuration tools, and since I don’t use redhat I can’t help you any there.

Almost every linux system I’ve had has been a dual boot system. I’ve only ever installed one that wasn’t. I originally only used LILO, then once LILO completely wacked out my MBR and made the machine unbootable. Fortunately this was back in the days of windows 95 and simply booting from a floppy and doing the old fdisk/mbr fixed it. After that I was a little shy of LILO, and I always used LOADLIN instead. I would usually set it up so that windows had a Linux icon, which was just a shortcut to LOADLIN with the “run in ms-dos” mode switch turned on (forced the computer to reboot into dos, then loaded linux from there).

The last linux system I set up was win2000/linux, and since win2000 doesn’t have dos I couldn’t use loadlin, so I decided to be brave and see how well LILO worked these days. On my one system (not exactly a broad test) it worked fine.

As long as you pay close attention to what drive and partition you are shoving things into, I don’t think you will have much of a problem.

Make sure all of your hardware is supported by linux before you start.

4

RedHat now uses GRUB as the bootloader, which is a heck of a lot more friendly than LILO.

UnuMondo

5

If you want a dual boot, you should put Linux on last so LILO or whatever can boot the proper operating system for you. The safest way to go is to backup your data first, then re-partition your HDD with a program such as Partition Magic.

On the Linux, you can create up to 7 drives - swap, boot, usr, etc, etc. You can do this with RedHat’s installer. FWIW, I use debian, because apt-get is a lot better than RPM for updating stuff.

6
      • Idle opinions/observations:
        1–Linux is very not user-friendly.
        2–Retail versions come with one-click easy-to-use installers. This is maybe $40 for the current version, $20 for last years’, but well worth the price IMO… It will have the option to install various free software too, so you don’t have to figure out how to do that right away. If your net connection method is Linux-friendly, you can at least surf with it.
        3–Most hardware still does not have Linux drivers available. Videocards have a default standard software mode (they should all show something, but won’t have hardare accelleration available), but don’t be surprised if your [printer,scanner,soundcard,webcam,game controller,MP3/assorted music portable,any USB device] can’t be used at all in it. My current PC is ~2.5 years old and most of the hardare on it still doesn’t have any Linux drivers available yet.
        4–So what do you do with Linux if it won’t run any of your stuff? -I dunno… Win98 bombed and had to be reinstalled because I needed Win98 to run software for school. I never did reinstall Linux, because I couldn’t figure out how to use it for anything. <:/
        5–GO to your local bookstore and strongly consider going with whichever Linux distro has the most books available specifically for it. You want a book specifically for your distro/version, a general Linux book won’t help a beginner much at all. Back when I was looking for books on Mandrake, mostly what I saw were books on Red Hat and BSD.
        ~
7

I haven’t tried it yet but I have heard nothing but good things about Redhat 8 - and especially that its even easier to install and use than 7.3. I’ve used slackware and Redhat 6 - 7.3.

Redhat 7.3, downloaded for free as described in the OP has the easy graphical installer, there is no reason to pay money for the distribution you won’t get anything different.

This distribution recognizes most modern hardware and a lot of legacy hardware - I can use both my TNT 3d card and my GeForce2 with full hardware acceleration support. I can also use my printer and hundreds of other dot matrix, inkjet and laser printers - all out of the box. Most sound cards are compatible with a basic chipset (such as soundblaster) and will work - I have yet to find a sound card that doesn’t work in Linux and under 7.3 I had to do exactly nothing to get it working (previous distributions were more difficult). I don’t have experience with other hardware such as scanners and webcams but I’d expect similar levels of support.

As far as books the only book I’ve ever bought was the O’Reilly Linux in a Nutshell. For most things I’ve found the man pages or linuxdoc.org more useful (the O’Reilly book essentially is the man pages, but it fills in some gaps, provides some examples and ties things together a little bit).

Redhat 7.3 comes with all you need for basic internet usage (such as web browsers, email clients, instant messengers etc.) You can get a free office suite compatible with MS Office documents from openoffice.org.

As far as the OP and the drive partitioning thing, you can’t repartition your D: drive without wiping it out unless you purchase a utility such as PowerQuest’s partition magic. I’d agree with engineer_computer_geek on general approach.

8

I went out and bought the boxed version of RH8 a couple of months ago, mostly because I’m stuck on dialup and I figured I could use the 30 days of free support see as to how a I was a total newbie.

I installed it on my notebook after a couple of minor problems that involved not thoroughly reading the installation instructions. RH8 comes with a DOS partition utility called fips that you use on a Windows boot disk to split your windows partition before you actually install Linux. Pretty simple, actually.

As far as hardware, I had suprisingly few problems, given that I was, after all, installing it on a notebook. I had the expected hangup with my winmodem, but I managed to steal a compatible one on eBay. Otherwise, it’s been a breeze.

Redhat starts you up with enough apps to actually get work done without getting under the hood. Right now I’m happily learning, tinkering, and customizing as I go along. I’ve only booted to Windows once in the past two weeks, and that was to get pictures off of my cheapass Pentax digital camera that isn’t directly supported by gtkam yet. Once I figure out how to mount a USB disk, I won’t even need it for that.

I expect that in less than six months, I’ll be posting questions about ways to wipe my Windows partition without destroying mi Linux data, if that gives you any idea.

Go for it, d00d.

9

I guess I should go into further depth on how the process worked for me in RH8. This was on a single-drive system, though.

Start up windows, and make a boot disk. Insert the first RH8 CD, and copy fips and its related files to the boot floppy from the /dosutils directory on the RH CD.

Then scan and defrag your hard drive.

Restart your computer with the boot floppy in he A: drive. Once DOS starts up, type “fips” and hit enter. Fips will create two (or more) Windows partitions on the drive, one of which you’ll delete during the actual RH install process. Once you choose your partition sizes and let fips do its work, restart the computer with the first RH CD in the drive. You’ll then be guided through the RH installation process.

Oh, if you’ve got less than 128 megs of RAM, don’t try to use the graphical installer. The text-based one is just as easy, but you use your tab and arrow keys instead of the mouse.

Atfter typing all of that, I realized that you should probably read the actual documentation. This is for RH 7.1, but the process was essentially the same for me.

10

Man I love the 'dope, you guys rock!

The list of steps I will be taking. Feel free to poke holes/add reality to it.

  1. Copy only folder on my 40 gig D drive elsewhere, leaving me with a blank D drive.
  2. Pull up dos prompt, fdisk, reformat then repartion D drive, with 20 gig for Win98, 20 for Linux.

Now in fantasy world I would pop the disk in the drive while I have win98 up, and install that Linux onto the unused part of the D drive. I guess in reality though, I have don’t know what to do after step 2. Here’s what I have downloaded thus far.

Redhat Valhalla 7.3 i386 iso disk1, disk2, disk3
Srpms disk 1 and 2 iso (bout 550 meg each)

Theres one additional thing that should make things a bit worse. I have no floppy drive. Backing up drive C is not an available action, as I have nothing to back it up on, so lets keep that in mind as well. Am I nuts for trying this? What do I do after step 2 mentioned above?

Thanks for all the responses.

11

Should I order a floppy from Dell before moving on? I have 384 meg of ram just so yall know.

12

What I’d do is order a CD-R drive. You can use that to back up your data, which is a good idea even if you’re not mucking about with partitions. Then you can use it to burn the RedHat ISO images onto CDs. Then boot the system from those CDs. It should be easier than trying to install from images on the hard drive. Otherwise, how were you planning to boot up the system to run the Linux install program? Maybe there’s a way, but why complicate things?

The Windows/DOS version of FDISK cannot create Linux partitions. You can use it to delete the current partitions though. The RedHat installation program will let you create the new partitions.

13

Another option you might consider is Knoppix. It’s a distribution of Linux that comes as a bootable ISO image. It doesn’t touch your hard drive unless you explicitly ask it to, so it’s great for trying out Linux. Since a CD drive is slower than a hard drive it will run a bit slower than it would if you were running from a hard drive, but it’s not too bad. If you like it, you could then move on to install Red Hat.

Knoppix is available at http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

14

scr4 is right. You should burn these Redhat images onto bootable CD-ROMS.

I would suggest taking the time to download Redhat 8.0. You really only need CD’s #1 and #2… and possibly 3. The srpms (Discs 4 and 5) hold source code that is really only of interest to developers. Disc #3 holds documentation, which you might find helpful, but is not necessary to run Redhat.

The steps you have outlined are solid. However, you don’t need 20 gigs for Linux. Most of that space will more than likely just go to waste. I’d suggest formatting your 40-gigger as 30 as a FAT partition, 9 gigs for a linux partition (still being quite generous), and 1 gig for a Linux swap partition (a general rule of thumb is 2x your physical RAM). Make all the partitions primary partitions for simplicity’s sake. You can always mount the 30-gig FAT partition under Linux if you need access to the space or data that is stored on it. It’s not so easy reclaiming or accessing that space if you need to access it from windows.

At any rate, here are the steps I would suggest you take:

  1. Download and burn the Redhat 8.0 CD’s.
  2. Backup your ‘D’ drive.
  3. Insert Redhat 8.0 Disc #1 into your CD-ROM drive and boot from it.
  4. Using the ‘Disk Druid’ utility from the install sequence, delete your partition on the ‘D’ drive (should show up as /dev/hdb per linux, /dev/hda will be your ‘C’ drive, don’t muck with this… Just double-check the drive sizes to be sure you have the right drive.
  5. Create your 30-gig, 9 gig, and 1 gig partitions on /dev/hdb, defining the 30-gig as FAT, 9-gig as ext2 with a mount point of ‘/’, and the 1-gig as type ‘swap’
  6. Continue with the installation (might as well do a full installation).
  7. When the install sequence is done, you will be able to reboot, and choose between Windows 98 and Redhat.
  8. Restore your ‘D’ drive data from Windows.
15

You probably don’t need to get it from Dell if you have a desktop. Any old IDE CD-R drive will do.

16

Thanks guys, I’m going to go with RH 8.0, and go for it tonight, If I don’t post for awhile it means I screwed up. :smiley:

17

I’m surprised no one’s suggested Mandrake. The setup really couldn’t get any easier than that from partitioning, to setting up your directory system, to autodetecting and installing your hardware and software. I’ve used/installed about 7 or 8 different flavors and have found Mandrake to be the simplest to install.

Also, it is based on Red Hat, so you still get to take advantage of RPMs. andrake has a great utility (kind of like Windows add/remove programs) to set up and remove software from the system. You can download the ISOs and burn the CDs just like any other distro.

18

^&$^#%! Disk Druid. Here’s what I did and some questions about it.

Burned up ISOs (3 disks) no prob.
Copied all folders off my 40 gig D Drive in Windows.
Changed bios to boot from cd.
Comp boots, I select graphical installation, no probs yet.
Select English blah blah
Set as workstation.
Manually partition?, yes, druid pops up.
9 gig ext2 for linux mount to “/” no prob
1 gig swap, no prob
30 to vfat, problem

It says that I need to mount it to linux file system ???

<Jerry Seinfeld> And whats up with the primary partition?<js>

Does the order I do each partition make a difference?

I also tried to add a new vfat partition but it told me that the size (30 gig) was too big.

We’re in the home streach, I just need a little more help.

19

Ignore the guy, I guess thats what happens when you close the JS tag :smiley:

20

You want to mount your Windows partition on your linux system. That way, when you’re in linux, you can copy files to and from your Windows space. Very handy. Mounting it won’t hurt it, just make sure you don’t accidentally re-partition it. (That will hurt it.) :slight_smile:

And no, the order of the partitions doesn’t make a difference.