[techtalk] Delurk/Getting started

[Penguina]

On Wed, 23 May 2001, Ruhiel wrote:

> helping. At the moment, i'm downloading an ISO of SUsE 7.1, which
> seemed to be one of the better distro's for newbies. (Discuss?)

I started with RH and moved to SuSE because RH 7.0 had a really
bad compiler, cost the earth, and didn't come with as many goodies.

> I'm seriously contemplating partitioning off 2-3 gig of my current
> windows machine (HP 6545c, Celeron 500, 20gb HD and 191mb) and running
> it from there. I know that I have to make a Linux partition, not a
> FAT32. Here's where I get confused... After I burn the ISO's onto CD,
> will it boot from the CD, or do I have to use my old windows boot
> disk? If I have to use the boot disk.. err.. i'll be lost.

In the download area there is a directory called "images" which have
the boot images and modules that you need to copy to floppy using
er, um, dd under unix.  (more complete info is in the README file
in that directory) On the first install, boot from those disks (there
are three of them -- one boot disk and two full of modules that you
may or may not need depending on your hardware setup.)

If you can't boot from the floppy image, you might want to check your
bios settings to make sure that it's set to boot from floopy (this is
the default with windows setups usually, as you know when you leave
a floppy in the drive when you reboot -- it tries to boot from the
floppy, right?)

One thing you can do with their setup, after loading your boot image,
from floppy is to install the stuff from rpm's directly off the network
(thus eliminating the step of downloading and copying all that stuff
to 7-8 CDs then selecting/installing various bits and pieces from there).

Since the boot image you startup from floppy through to connecting to
their server over the web step doesn't actually touch your hard
disk...once you get through that step and are confident
you can reproduce it, you know that you'll be able to finish the job
once you get that far.  OOOH ouch, you want to set it up dual-boot.

If you're using Win2K or NT as the windows setup that you don't
want to get lost, you *have* to continue to use the NT/Win2K
boot loader -- no lilo here.  There is a book called "The Multiboot
Configuration Handbook" by Roderick Smith that tells you all you
need to know (and more) about this (particularly good expl of the
boot partition, different disk partitioning programmes and what
they do, how various boot loaders work, etc.)  These are things
that are rather lightly covered in most distro docs and not
covered at all by Windows docs.   But dual-boot is, imho, a rather
delicate thing to be doing first time through.

You might consider doing some uh, dumpster-diving for a 486 or
PI or something for your first linux box, so you don't have to
worry about the fine points of setting it up dual boot.

> What are the chances if something totally not being compatible?

That's the beauty of dumpster-diving: the older the hardware the
greater the chances of the latest linux running out-of-the-box.
Just the opposite of the planned obsolescence of Win/Intel rollouts.

Anyway, if you go to the SuSE site, they have hardware compatibility
lists, just like on the RedHat site.  Cable modems are a bit of a
pain under Linux --

> Not to mention my cable modem.. i'm not even going to attempt to get
> THAT going until i'm better at this. I've heard scary things.

Nothing scares you when the various bits of hardware were dragged
out of the garbage (or purchased at rock-bottom prices at a
garage sale or a failed dot-com's fire sale...)

> Am I getting in over my head? I have a Linux guru friend that can help
> me, but it's finding the time for him to come over that's the problem.
> This man lives for install parties :)

You'll learn a lot more than you bargained for.  But you might want to set
up a very low-end linux machine as a "minimal install"  and tighten it
down with as many security measures as you can find... first -- and
place it between your Windows machine and the rest of the internet.
Free firewall!

other advantage is all your interaction with the firewall will be text,
which means you won't have to screw around with X your first time around
(you don't want to be running an X server on a firewall).

Get Thee to A Dumpster, Go!

Cheryl