Want to be new to linux

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In january i built myself a nice XP box. Its fine and all.

My brother asked me to do some work for him for pay, but as I have just made him a Vista machine, I asked for his old XP instead. Its about 3 years old.

Here is the catch. I want to try out linux. So I need to reformat that hard disk, remove xp, and install linux.

So I am asking for a step by step walk through! Anyone care to?

Mandriva looks nice, but I am not too fussy.

Pretend I know nothing, I have infinite patience, and if the whole experiment does work, I can easily do something else. Break it down into a numbered list of steps? Thanks in advance...but not til you help!

Hold the phone, I just put Linux on an older box. Don't remove Windows yet. I downloaded Ubuntu, burned a CD using a freebie ISO burner program. After you burn the CD or get one for a I think a buck and postage, put it in your CD drive and have the machine boot from it. You may need to go into your manger to do it, on mine it's F2 key and this one it's the Delete key, I think others are different still. OK tell it to look at the CD drive first then hard drive, this will bring up a screen you can just run Linux straight from the CD drive. This will also let you know if you have hardware trouble. OK say thing are well, restart the machine, when you've played with Linux a bit and then you will see an install screen, first have it check the CD to make sure it was a good burn, if it was install. When you go back into your boot set up you change it back to harddrive first or what ever you had before, then when it boots you will have the choice of either Windows or Linux, go from there. It takes a little to wrap your mind around it if all you've ever had was a windows box. In the mean time you still have a functional system if you need to go back to windows.

Side note, I'm getting this machine ready for a 64 bit install of Ubuntu as well. It took about 1 hour for the 32 bit on the other machine, with a walk through from a member of WP using voice on Skype, but he was rusty and we ran into trouble with a NVidia video driver, there was a box that could have been checked is all and we screwed around for a good while figuring it out, which was fun anyway. What I'm saying is this, it took an hour to install it all and that was including the driver thing and updating and adding some extras. It took me 3 and a half hours last night to do a reformat and fresh install of XP on this one, with an addition half hour later, just to get it to what I had before and it doesn't come close to what Ubuntu just comes with straight off the CD. I even cheated and had some things downloaded for the fresh install and stored on my D drive. I have done so many windows re installs I have lost count, I can do them fast, but yet it still took a lot of time to do. I still haven't put World of Warcraft back on this and I know that will run into some serious time, but that doesn't count for just the basic comparisons between install times.

I will keep XP on this one till it is no longer supported. I have plenty of room for both. It wasn't running Explorer stable so I decided it was past time for a fresh install with just the basics on it. I will most likely delete XP on the other one, although my understanding is you can run XP in a window from within Linux if your system is up to it. Not as much eye candy with Linux, but I do think with Vista seriously messing up, Linux will have a surge happening. I already saw a new add on from IBM to the office package that comes standard with Ubuntu, last night. Media player of some kind, dunno yet.

Ubuntu is good, and they'll even send you CDs for free (you don't even pay shipping). It's easy to install, slap it in the CD drive, reboot, and Ubuntu will boot up and you'll have the option to install it. Click on that icon and a wizard will guide you through. Ubuntu will do all the removal and reformatting of the drive for you.

Ok. my next question regards windows and something I have not done. The whole Hdd is formated to windows NTFS format.. so i need to roll some of that back so that linux can have some space for its own format style(it doesnt like windows closed source NTFS format)

(See that? its got NT in it! always causing us trouble... those NTS!)

This is actually a lot of fun folks.

Ah. This answered everything I wanted to know!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 2637434537

Take the plunge! Someone else install It as well!

A fight and one half. It had nothing to do with Linux, and it actually fixed a problem i had before.

My DVD was plugged into the secondary IDE. So I couldnt boot from DVD! This is great! For a long time, I thought it had something to do with the DVD and I attempted to update drivers.. settings.. you name it.

So Here I am posting to WP running Ubuntu Linux from DVD. It can even run from CD. Tomorrow I will actually try to install it. FRom what I hear, it will take maybe an hour tops.

And its BEAUTIFUL! Nice interface!

Thanks for your help guys.

Really, potpaleo, "Not as much eye candy with Linux"? You're saying that a spinning desktop cube against a 3D skydome, translucent windows on a zoomed desktop, multiple desktops, windows that, when closed, fold themselves into paper planes and fly off screen, or burn down, or up, and being able to write your name in fire across the screen, is not eye-candy?

Fuzzy, the Installing Ubuntu with Windows Dual-Boot video clip is brilliant. I'd not seen that before. It's a little dated, but still quite accurate.

There are a whole mass of recent screencasts at http://screencasts.ubuntu.com/ in Flash or OGG which look useful.

Yeah, you know I was mesmerized with the screen savers and some other goodies. Now, dear friend, let's compare the Skype interface, between Linux and XP. No Ubuntu is hardly barren, actually it's a lot more comfortable to my eye then any version of Windows ever was, and I do remember the Vic-20 and that was bliss compared to the old man's TI programmable calculators. We've come a long ways.

I should have been more cautious. because i didnt have unformated sectors on my HD, ubuntu borked my windows xp. I only just got it all going again today.

I'm not sure I following you exactly. It more then is likely what you're talking about is over my head at this point. If I am following you correctly, I believe all my hard drives to be formatted using NTFS (XP) and had no trouble with Linux mixing on the same harddrive. I even booted into windows and defraged everything on it, including Linux and it booted into Linux with no problems. I think I even compressed it using XP, before the defrag, but can't swear to it. But it usually is the way I do it, I am a creature of habit.

What i mean was that i had two NTFS partisons on my HDD, taking up the whole drive. when I installed ubuntu, it took 50 gigs from that.. and didnt seem to overwrite anything, but it borked the xp file system.. whatever the xp version of a FAT is. i can still go into that and take my old stuff off it.

in another day or two, i will do just that, and i will reformat my OLD hard drive, reattempting a double boot using that. this current HDD will safely be removed.

I'm not at all clear on what you mean by "borked".

Ubuntu (which really doesn't need more than 10Gbytes) gives you various options on an install. One of them is to steal space from an existing partition. It sounded as if you meant that you did that with a Windows XP NTFS partition, and that partition was then unreadable. However, you then go on to say that it's perfectly readable?

XP can be installed on a FAT file system, but it tries to persuade you (sensibly) to use NTFS. Linux is now happy with NTFS (provided MS don't change it, again, which they do, when they feel like it, because it's a proprietary format). Linux prefers file systems like EXT3, which doesn't require defragmenting, by its nature, and does journalling, which minimises the chance of losing data on a power failure.

A brief summary of HDD (and indeed other media) organisation:

• The start of the drive holds a small table for up to four "primary" partitions.
• Exactly one of those may be used as an "extended" partition.
• Within the extended partition, you have a chain of as many "logical" partitions as you like.
• Linux numbers the primary partitions as 1, 2, 3 and 4, in the order that they appear in the table at the front of the disk. Regardless of whether all these are actually in use, logical partitions are numbered from 5 onward, according to their order on the linked list.
• MS Windows allocates "drive letters" to partitions according to an algorithm that is far too complex to be understood by mere mortals.
• Every partition consists of one single slab of contiguous space of your hard drive, with all the logical partitions contained inside the extended partition.
• There is a single byte for each partition, that gives a clue as to what that dollop of space is used for. There are rather a lot of these. Almost 100 of the 256 possible values are used. Two are only valid for primary partitions: "Empty" and "Extended". The rest include things like "FAT12" "FAT16" "W95 FAT32" "HPFS/NTFS" "Linux" "Minix / Old linux" "Plan 9" "Syrinx" and variants on them. You can actually just change this byte, without destroying the file system stored within it. I've done so to fool XP into thinking that there was no old install on a drive.
• Within each partition, there will be a file system. MS Windows can understand (some of) the FAT types, and the more modern flavours of Windows can handle NTFS. Broadly speaking, Linux will handle all them all.

Yeah, i am seeing that unbuntu 7.04 will now read the NTFS partition.

What happened, lau, and i appreciate all the attention... is that win XPs HAL.DLL was corrupted or lost. the drive was still readable, but good old HAL is needed to boot XP. someones idea of a joke name perhaps?

Borked is slang for broken.. and also references the swedish chef from the muppets.

Ah! Losing HAL.DLL is not Linux's fault. XP loses that one on a regular basis, all on its own, without any outside assistance.

Oh, i dont blame linux! i blame the guy installing it! ME!

Now I have a trouble. my mouse keeps locking up. its a microsoft wireless. And also my wacom puck and stylus.

The only thing windows is good for is playing games. Other than that, it's useless.