Linux in a nutshell.

[Dimuza]

Hiya Gid & Co.

I'm getting a new laptop delivered probably by Saturday - XP Pro installed, no other partitions.

Is it very difficult to create a new partition, to get a dual boot system up & going? I've also never really messed around with Linux (I've got a copy of knoppix laying around here somewhere that I've doodled around in without having a clue what I was doing), but it was something I always thought I might try.

I see people saying they'd recommend SuSe for laptops...that's simply due to it being able to get all things running with little "help" from me?

No matter which dist I chose, I'd be able to run ANY of the Linux apps, get EQ & maybe WoW installed & running, using the winex app?

[Gidan]

First thing you will need to do is repartition your drive. Since XP has come preloaded you probably want to use something like partition magic to resize your ntfs partitions. How much space you need to free up is really up to you, I wouldn't free up less then 5G, more like 15G if you can spare it. You don’t need that much, but many of the easy installations on things like SuSE and Fedora really take up space.

Knoppix is a good way to see how Linux runs and lets you get use to the X environment of KDE (thing that’s what knoppix is using these days). If you’re new to Linux, I would suggest playing around with SuSE, Fedora or Ubuntu. All are fairly easy to get running and should auto detect just about every piece of hardware you have.

The things that might get iffy will be your graphics card and wireless networking if you are planning to use that. For running your games, you can use either wine or cedega. I lean toward cedega myself. In general everything I use runs well on Linux.

If you need help getting it up and running, let us know.

[Harrison]

I'm going to be loading up Ubuntu very soon.

Raising myself to nerd-dom unheard of

[Dimuza]

Is there generally a problem getting knoppix to run on a dual core system? Both of my Knoppix CD's (which work fine on my other machines) don't finish booting up on the new laptop.....no errors, it just dies, so I'm sorta stumped at the start :\

[Tossica]

I'd think they'd have to update the kernel to support the duo core.

[Gidan]

There is no problem I am aware of getting a knoppix CD to boot on a dual core system. I do not believe it would boot to a smp kernel and therefore you wouldn't have access to both CPU's, however it should boot and provide full support of a single core. I have never attempted to boot to knoppix on my dual core systems, I will give it a try tonight and see what happens.

What is your new laptop?

[Dimuza]

It's a Core 2 Duo T7200 2.0 Ghz, with 2 gigs of RAM. Chipset Intel 945PM & ICH7M-BM - it's using a 7900 GTX 512 MB graphics card.
Did your dual core boot up?

[Tikker]

It's a Core 2 Duo T7200 2.0 Ghz, with 2 gigs of RAM. Chipset Intel 945PM & ICH7M-BM - it's using a 7900 GTX 512 MB graphics card.
Did your dual core boot up?

dell? or what brand

[Dimuza]

no brand....well, I guess it'd be called a Clevo.

[Dimuza]

Well, I scrounged up a copy of partition magic, created myself a 10 gig partition for linux & a 500 meg swap partition, too.
Think I'm going to try a SUSE install....I'll let you know how it goes. Downloading the iso's now ....

[Martrae]

Kahar made an Ubuntu box this weekend. Will be playing around with it for a while I guess.

[Tossica]

Linux = Lame for the amount of work you have to put in to it. If I was a developer or putting up a web server I'd use it but I'm not so it's a pain in the ass. I've used Unix off and on for 18 years and it's always felt like "work" to use it no matter how "user friendly" the distro is. Apple finally got it right with OSX but I hate Apple so Windows it is.

[Tikker]

I've never really understood people's hardon for linux either

especially those that get so worked up about it that the just hate on MS

I've got no issues with people who want to use it for a server, or a webserver, or what have you

I'm all about right tool for the right job


ps, it makes me giggle when people say they use linux over MS cause they don't want topay for an OS, then pay Cedega $60 a year to support games on linux, jeje

[10sun]

Took me all of 1 minute to decide that I wanted to run a VM of Linux.
Took me 10 minutes to find a VM solution (VirtualBox by Innotek).
Took me 10 minutes to download a copy of VirtualBox (GPU license, fuck VMWare).
Took me 10 minutes to decide which distributions of Linux I'd like to play with (Mandriva, Knoppix, & SUSE).
45 minutes to download a copy of Mandriva.
15 minutes to get running.
Here I am, posting from my first Linux box in 6 years.
Easy stuff.
Lets see if I ever use it again =P

[Lyion]

http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/archi ... ws-xp.aspx

[Tikker]

not sure what that has to do with linux, but yeah, XP is great

[Harrison]

Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP

Man that made me lol...

[Lyion]

That was meant to be in another thread, the Vista and gaming one.. Not sure how it's here.. Probably my piss poor multitasking while watching football.