Unix Attax!

In My Humble Opinion
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      • Seeing as my lame-o college doesn’t offer enough classes in Unix, I plan to start exploring it myself, so I can at least claim some knowledge on my resume and not be totally lying. Couple questions though:
  1. I have heard that some versions of Linux (not exactly the same as Unix, but I knew that) have installers that are very good, and others have installers that are not so good. Which ones suck?
  2. I plan to add another hard drive to my PC. Do I have to use a disk partitioner to install another OS on it? If I kept all my Windows stuff on drive C and all my Linux stuff on drive E, and C and E were separate hardware drives, that is. I will want to put some Windows files on drive E, also, but Windows98 itself will stay on C.
  3. Also, I’m wondering, how do you go about switching between operating systems (like, they’re both installed already, and you’re using Windows for whatever and you want to switch to Linux to do something else. What do you have to do? Can a PC multi-task operating systems?) - MC
    ~
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    ~
    Marge Simpson “What is all this stuff?”
    Smithers: “Heh-heh-heh, according to your resume, Mrs. Simpson, you invented this equipment.”
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i use plug in hard disks Linux on one WindowsNT on another. i’ve got a Linux book that came with a multi-boot manager but i don’t remember the name. i’ll try to remember to check it at home tonight.

Multi-task Operating Systems? funny thing about software, theoretically you can do almost anything but getting someone to write code that good is a b!tch. switching between operating systems is usually like warm booting the system and selecting the next OS you want to run.

Dal Timgar

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  1. I generally use Mandrake or RedHat, both of which have good installers. I prefer Mandrake. I haven’t installed any other versions lately.

  2. You should generally be able to do this–just treat the two drives as separate partitions during installation. Your machine shouldn’t care.

  3. You’ll want to install Windows first. The Linux install should recognize Windows and include it in your boot options. If you install Linux first, Windows will just wipe its boot information. To fully switch between the OSes, you’ll usually have to reboot. However, Mandrake has a Linux4Windows module that will run a Linux shell inside Windows. I haven’t used it, but if you’ve got a good machine and aren’t running really heavy software, it should work.

Lots of "should"s and "usually"s; someone with more experience will probably be along soon to expand on this.

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  1. Mandrake, then Red Hat.
  2. You can install Linux on the second HD. Windows and Linux do not co-exist.
  3. linux has a handy utility called Lilo which installs in the MBR and does the switching for you. All you have to do to go from linux to win98 is reboot and type in the OS you want to use at the prompt

http://www.linuxnewbie.com I think that’s the link, should be a great site.

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I tried doing exactly what you are planning on doing. With 2 hd’s and all. I was going to use Red Hat 7.0, but for some reason, only the text-based installer would work, not the GUI. Then I started having problems with the Linuxed based OS. So I took the drive out and stuck with Windows 98. Very frusterating, but I’m determined to figure it out. I really want to learn Linux as well. Can anyone explain how I might install Linux on my current hard-drive with Win98 and 30gigs? Do you have to partition it yourself, or will Linux do it for you. And if Linux does it for you will it format and erase everything first? And finally, I remember reading about a partionless-install, but I never saw an option for this when I tryed installing it the first time.

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There’s a program called Partition Magic that is supposedly extremely easy to use, and it comes with Mandrake.

Personally, though, I’ve never been one to do things the easy way. When I first installed Debian, there was a bunch of things I wanted to keep from Windows, but not much of it was OS-specific (and besides, I wanted to try out WINE and other things). So I deleted as much as I could (4 gb hard drive, doncha know), ran a defrag utility, and used FIPS (First Interactive Partitioning System, I think) to make a partition I could install Linux on.

So at this point, I’ve got about a gig of Linux and three of stuff I don’t want on my HD. I borrow a friend’s backpack CD burner, boot into Win98, install drivers, burn off all the stuff I want to keep, and then re-install Debian, using the larger partition as my main one.

But to anyone wanting to learn Linux, some hints:

  1. The commands man and info are your friends. man <subject> will bring up a document on a command, and info <subject> brings up more detailed information. Also, know where the HOWTO files are. ‘find | grep HOWTO > /home/foo/howto.txt’, in the / directory, will tell you where they are.

  2. Know thy hardware. Before you even think of installing, make sure you know what kind of video card, sound card, network card (if applicable), etc you have. If you’re not sure, usually the name of the video card flashes across the top of the screen when you first turn on your machine (let your monitor warm up before you turn it on), and your sound card is, likelier than not, going to be tricky. When in doubt, open up your computer and look for a product code/number. You’re better off searching Google for it than you are the manufacturer’s website, due to the design of most of their websites.

  3. Modems. If you’re on a dialup, make sure you don’t have a Winmodem. This is likely to be tricky and possibly a bit expensive, because most Wintel machines ship with Winmodems. Your best bet is an external modem, but I can also happily endorse the Lucent Technologies Call-Waiting modem. It advertises Linux support on the box, and unlike some companies I could mention (Linksys), it actually has documentation on installing it in Linux!

  4. Pretty does not mean Easy. A menu-based text install can very often be a lot easier than a glitzy GUI install.

  5. Similarly, try many window managers with X. Gnome, KDE and Enlightenment are the de facto standard for new Linux users, but you should try a lot of them to see what you like (Blackbox and WindowMaker, particularly.)

  6. When it comes to paper documentation, O’Reilly is your best bet. Big, thick books are very often poorly written and more expensive, but O’Reilly books tend to be more informative. I recommend Running Linux and Linux in a Nutshell.

  7. Have fun, good luck, and tally-ho!

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Beg to differ about Linux and Windows not co-existing.
I believe RH comes with the option to use fat-32 as the file system type.
Disadvantage. slooooow.
Advantage.
No partitioning (which brings up second point. don’t need second hd, just second partition).
And I would concur with the beauty of Mandrake’s install.
Essentially is RedHat with a much more newbie friendly setup. Oh, and at the moment a more up-to-date kernel.