[Techtalk] Newbie needs advice

[Anne Wainwright]

Hi, Juliet

see below ...

On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 16:20:09 -0800 (PST)
Juliet wrote:

|> Hello,
|> 
|> I'm a college student with minimal Linux experience.  I have an HP laptop with 2 internal 80GB drives.  I want to put XP Media Center (which is what came with the laptop) on the 1st 80GB drive.  I want to partition the 2nd 80GB drive and use half of it for data and the other half for Linux.

Yes, do make a seperate data partition. Then you can change distro or whatever without backup hassles. I doubt you need 40G for an installation, check that out.

|> 
|> 1)    What is a good version of Linux to use and learn from?

I am just moving to Ubuntu for desktop services myself. I believe this is very good from what I have seen, and South African billionaire Mark Shuttleworth (Canonical) has put lots of money behind this so you are not going to get dropped (as I was with Libranet, which was a great desktop distro in its day, when the founding father died). It gives a nice desktop installation. Choose the Gnome option if you want to stay simple and pure, but KDE may be more Windows-like.

|> 
|> 2)   What kind of issues could happen from having a dual-boot?  Namely, will it work?

I have been a newbie for years, and have wrecked and broken just about everything breakable _except_ the dual boot bit. Whether you get a Grub or a Lilo setup they both work reliably

|> 
|> 3)    What are some good websites and books I could use to learn Linux better?  I have some books, but they're from older distributions - Fedora Core 2.

I won't recommend any specific book, mine are all old things, but anything published by O'Reilly is usually at the top of my list. This is a really nice group to get help on, no flaming and rudeness by those who know more than you do, but as they say rtfm first!

bestest
Anne



|> 
|> I already have some CompTIA certs and I want to get the Linux+ cert as well so I'd appreciate any advice about how to get proficient.
|> 
|> Thanks!
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-- 
so much to do, so little time :(