Okay, here’s the deal. I’m currently running WinXP Home on an NTFS-formatted HD. I have a FAT32-formatted drive in the system (disconnected) that I would like to install Mandrake 9 to so I can learn Linux. I’m guessing that I’m going to need a copy of PartitionMagic or some such program to create a partition on the FAT32 drive so I can run the install. Anyone care to help a geek out?
-brianjedi
PartitionMagic is for resizing a partition without data loss. If you need to make the FAT32 partition smaller and use the freed space to install Linux, then yes, you need something like that. But if you can delete or move all the data from the FAT32 partition, you don’t need any commercial software. You just delete the whole partition and make a new partition (or several) with an EXT2 or EXT3 filesystem. You get a chance to do this during installation - it lets you run a FDISK-like utility.
Actually I’ve never used Mandrake so I can’t guarantee the above, but I’ve used a couple other distributions and that’s how it works.
brianjedi - you can do as Scr4 has so wisely advised. Can’t fault it.
However remember this is linux AKA a powerful little Dos prompt (don;t hit my linux people) … If i were you and i was going to do the “i wanna learn linux thing” I would not play around with your main machine.
Linux does not need the grunt a windows machine does. I see no reason why mandrake would not work on a old 486 …
Linux please advise on system reqs ?
Linux is no longer simply a shell prompt. Having a good shell prompt to use is one of the reasons I personally like it, but Linux has had good GUIs for years now. You can become a pretty good Linux user with minimal, if any, shell experience.
(Oh, and comparing the Linux command line to DOS is like comparing a Porsche to a go-kart. The two entities simply cannot be considered similar except in the most superficial way.)
You can run Linux on a cell phone if you teak the software enough. But the way to get the most out of Linux, as with all software, is to run it on good hardware. While Mandrake 9 will probably install on a 486 and run in a text-only state, you most likely will not be able to run a GUI at an acceptable speed. As you are coming from the point-and-drool MS-Windows world, this would not help you learn Linux. For the love of all that’s good, install Mandrake on a real machine and give it a fighting chance to impress you. 
Damn. s/teak/tweak/
Mandrake won’t install on a 486. One of the main points of Mandrake is that it is compiled for Pentium!
If you have nothing on your spare HD I’d say just install on that. Mandrake has a nice GUI partition manager which will allow you to create your Ext2/3 partitions. My current partition setup on a 6 Gig HD (oldish machine) is /boot (500 meg), / (2.5 Gig), /home (about 2.8) and a swap partition of 128 Meg.
I seperated / and /home so that if I felt like switching distro or upgrading from scratch, I still had my files and settings.
Mandrake should automatically set up the machine for dual boot.
Small nitpick, the Mandrake 8.1 distro is running just fine on my AMD box… That’s something my copy of the game Black & White could never do.
Not that I’m bitter about buying a game that won’t run on my pc, or anything.
Darth: Modern AMD chips and Pentiums are binary-compatible. What you’re saying is nothing that particularly needs to be said.
(Not that that’s ever stopped anyone before. :))