Switching to Linux, Need Help

[#1cubeplayer]

Hey all. My computer is acting up, missing dll's, and freezing too much. I've decided that since I'm going to have to reinstall Windows, I might as well ditch that and switch to Linux. I've been wanting to try it out for years, and I think now is the time. I'd appreciate it if any of you could give me any help/suggestions and recommend any specific distributions. I think I can use WINE emulation to run a lot of Windows aps but I have to admit I don't know much about this. Help/advice/etc please. :smile:

[RoadKill]

Ubuntu is the easiest distribution to start with for a lot of people.

If you don't know much about it, use Windows.

[Schpickles]

Best bet is to be prepared to do a fair amount of reading. There's heaps of documentation out there for all types of users, but you've got to be prepared to go look for it.

Firstly - you always have the option of dual booting - ie you can run Linux and Windows on the same HDD. Don't know if that solves your windows app woes? Also, there's often perfectly adequent open source alternatives, many of which offer MS-compatible support (I'm thinking things like OpenOffice, the GIMP etc). WINE will run some windows stuff, especially the simpler windows apps, but generally speaking there's not much point. You're normally better off finding the open source equivalent program which is free and native to linux :)

I've heard Ubuntu mentioned a couple of times on this board - I never tried that distro myself.

Generally speaking, I found most Linux distros easy enough to set up - especially if you are just putting Linux on a HDD and not windows. The "best" I used in terms of ease of use and flexibility was Gentoo (http://www.gentoo.org) although I don't know how easy that would be for the novice user.

I had a lot of success with Red Hat (now Fedora Project) and SuSE. I didn't enjoy Mandrake so much - it was easy to set up, but later found that it wasn't set up in a flexible way.

Most of these distros have their own documentation project, which provides heaps and heaps of information. Read all the install guides first and print off the key guides. Before you start up, have a look and see if there are any aspects of your hardware that might give you issues. So many people have cheap USB modems which run off windows drivers rather than hardware, and which don't have decent support under linux... check things like that. Most graphics cards run under linux, but if you want 3D acceleration, check with your graphics chip maker and see if they have linux drivers (most of the major vendors do).

Basically, do your homework first, before jumping in. Many distros these days are as simple as popping a self-booting CD in the drive and following instructions, but knowing what is going on is always helpful.

There's more general information at The Linux Documentation Project (http://www.tldp.org).

Best bet is to ask us specific questions as you go.

[Mr_Odwin]

You could try a Linux Live CD first. You download and burn the CD then just boot straight from it. It won't affect your hard disk in any way so it's a totally safe way to try Linux first.
Knoppix is the most famous and popular but I also like slax.
Of the major distributions that I tired I liked Fedora and Yoper. Fedora is very easy to set up and Yoper is fast.

I pretty much gave up on Linux because of my USB modem that was a pain in the ass and I do a lot of video encoding which has loads more support under XP.

[Dieter]

Going a bit further on what Schpick said about graphics cards: getting an ATI card to work under linux is a BITCH to do, at least it is in my experience. But I hope you're not expecting to game much under linux anyway :) (although it is possible to a certain extent).

[#1cubeplayer]

So I've hit my first bump. I downloaded an ISO, burned it, booted it, and was letting the Linux installation do its thing. Then I noticed something about a USB error, and then it asked me to push enter if I wanted to use the US keyboard configuration or 1 to change it, but my keystrokes weren't doing anything. My keyboard is connected to my comp through USB, and it has some kind of problem with USB right from the beginning. What should I do now?

EDIT: So you know, I downloaded a distribution based on Slackware. I found this page www.linuxquestions.org/questions/archive/14/2003/04/4/51971+slackware+linux+usb+keyboard&hl=en which looks helpful, but I'd like your guys' aid as well.

[Grebe]

Slackware is da best yeah

Erm, if you have usb errors, im guessing it came up at boot? and if it did, for me it did, froze your instalation? well, if it did all thats needed is a nousb command at the start of the instalation.

[Shorty]

Ah the age old "no keyboard detected, press enter to continue" error.

[old_gregg]

ie you can run Linux and Windows on the same HDD..

Hey, i've been thinkin of doin that for a while but havent got a clue where to start. :confused: How would you go about doing that and does it create any Problems. I run Windows XP Home at the moment if thats any use.

[Mr_Odwin]

Is this helpful (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/369767)?
Maybe just trying a different distribution may work Cubey?

@old_gregg: As part of the installation Fedora can resize your windows partition and install along side it, but it's not perfectly safe to resize partitions and everything can screw up. I did it with no problems though.

[Offerman]

Yea, you will need a serial keyboard. USB has and never will work for a keyboard interface. Its totally unnessercery.

[Schpickles]

.

Hey, i've been thinkin of doin that for a while but havent got a clue where to start. :confused: How would you go about doing that and does it create any Problems. I run Windows XP Home at the moment if thats any use.

It's another one of those things that you should read up on first. Basically *nix have a much more flexible partitioning system than windows, and *nix systems tend to make use of partitions to a far greater degree than windows OS. Even a fairly simple linux install will use partitions to make sure that key areas of a hard drive such as swap space and boot data are kept seperate from user data. This ensures that the OS will always be able to boot, even if the HDD is filled. (I once filled my HDD from a commandline copying operation, only to find that windows could no longer boot because there wasn't enough hard drive space!)

A partition is basically a division in your hard drive, which can be seen effectively as a seperate disk. When creating a new partition or removing one, you will automatically invalidate all the data on that partition.

Windows uses partitions, but all it does by default is slap one massive parition across the entire drive it finds. You can however override this from the windows setup, using fdisk, simply opting to use less than all of the hard drives available disk space.

re-partitioning your drive isn't too complex, but it shouldn't be taken lightly. I'd recommend backing up everything, wiping your drive, then repartitioning. Install windows at the "front" of the drive (i.e. the first partition - which windows will name "C:", linux will call hd0). When windows is set up, pretty much every linux distro I've come across is capable of:

a) installing to any partition you chose
b) installing a boot loader program such as GRUB or LILO, which will actually let you select whether to boot windows or any installed linux distro (you could have more than one, if you liked!), and allows you to set what OS to boot by default
c) reading and writing to FAT32 and sometimes to NTFS partitions - I often created a "shared" partition so that I could access some shared data in both OSs.

The phrase you are looking for is "dual booting" - pick which distro you want to use first, then look for a dual booting guide... you'll find one.

[#1cubeplayer]

Slackware is da best yeah

Erm, if you have usb errors, im guessing it came up at boot? and if it did, for me it did, froze your instalation? well, if it did all thats needed is a nousb command at the start of the instalation.
It did come up at boot and it did freeze my installation. Can you tell me exactly what command to type at the beginning of the installation? I tried some commands, but it said something like, "kernel not found."

[Schpickles]

doesn't the slackware site have some instructions?

[DCK]

I have OpenSuSE (http://www.opensuse.org) on my PC now, after Fedora Core 4 which sucked bad. It looks pretty slick, is pretty easy to use with the Yast tool SuSE put in and it reads NTFS partitions so that's all good. I haven't really tried it much cause it's slow like fat poo going upstairs on my old Pentium 2, but I'm upgrading next month (GeForce 6800 oh yeah baby) so then it should work well. So far it seems pretty good though.

[Raining_again]

i shall be moving to suse linux when i buy me a hard disk, im doin as a few people have said and keeping windows, for running windows applications etc.

do you guys recommend keepin the 2 O.S's on the one harddisk, or is it better to keep them on two seperate ones?

[Schpickles]

It's fine to have them both on one, you just have to set the partitions up properly. In terms of linux, it doesn't make a jot of difference whether the partition is on a different physical drive or not.

The only advantage would be if you didn't want to set up windows again on the current drive... that's about it.

[#1cubeplayer]

Another little problem. Since I couldn't sort out the usb thing with Slackware and since I don't have a ps/2 keyboard, I decided to use OpenSUSE instead. I'm trying to do the internet installation, where I boot my computer with a tiny boot medium on a disc and give it an installation repository to download the distribution from. I managed to connect to the server the distro was on, but the I got a message saying that I didn't have enough memory for the data (understandably so, I'm on a mere 64mb :weep: ) and to enter a swap partition. I figured I should type in /dev/hda but then it says there was an error activating swap space. And so I need your help. :smile:

[DCK]

(understandably so, I'm on a mere 64mb :weep: )
You only have 64 MB RAM? That's too little for a window manager such as KDE or Gnome. I have 192 MB on my old PC and it still keeps pumping data to the hard disk because I haven't got enough memory, but then again, SuSE is about as heavy as Linux gets so far.

About your swap problem, I think you need a partition that's already formatted as a Linux swap partition. I had one left from the Fedora installation I had before so I guess you should get a formatting programm that'll create a swap partition for you.

[#1cubeplayer]

Don't rub it in. :weep:

If Suse is about as heavy as Linux gets, should I try to get a smaller distribution? I'll look into a formatting program. Thanks.

[Mr_Odwin]

Vector Linux is made with old comps in mind and has a fairly user friendly installer.

[Schpickles]

are you sure it's not referring to Hard drive storage, rather than physical RAM?

Have you got any partitions to store the data on in the first place?