OT: Linux

[Gandalf Parker]

One of my many sig files says....

-- I guess the new social rule is that politics, religion, and operating system are not topics for polite company.

[Sheap]

Slackware is a little more oriented to the advanced user, but I learned on Slackware (back when it was still the #1 distribution). If you are used to working in a commandline environment then you will be OK. You don't need to know any programming to set up or use the system, but if you do have some programming ability you can do additional things that you couldn't do otherwise (but this is not specific to Slackware, it's true of all Unix).

I use Slackware myself, primarily because it is very tolerant of being altered. Many distributions get a little antsy if you start tinkering with their stuff.

As far as Linux vs. NT/XP filesystems:
Linux has its own filesystem, called ext3. (There are other filesystems around, but this is more or less the "standard" one). Windows XP uses NTFS, which is called NTFS because it was originally developed for Windows NT. Files stored in a Linux ext3 filesystem can't be accessed by Windows, and while Linux can read NTFS, it can't write to it, at least not to recent Versions. It can both read and write DOS and Windows 95/98/ME filesystems. (And there are third-party commercial programs for both Windows and Linux that allow full access to the other OS's filesystems, if you really need it).

[Esben Mose Hansen]

Originally posted by Sheap:
Linux has its own filesystem, called ext3. (There are other filesystems around, but this is more or less the "standard" one).

Is ext3 standard? I'm not sure that is the case. If think SuSE use reiserfs (namesys made), and Gentoo recommends ext2, ext3 and reiserfs. The Last major filesystems in XFS (SGI made this, do not use without an UPS!) and JFS (which IBM made, and which rather sucks, I gather )

Just in case you encounter any of the others...

[Thilock_Dominus]

Just wanna say I've complete the download Mandrake 10.0...next step burning

While I'm at it, I have some questions.

Seems there is alot of filesystems to linux, which one is "best"? and where do I find them? Or should I go with the one which comes with mandrake?

On my XP I'm using Nero to burn, is there something similiar or better to linux?

I like to mess around with PSP8 on XP and it would be cool with a paint program as good or better to linux?

I stumble on the web with a program called Wine, is it any good to run M$ application and other windows program with?


best regards
Thilock

[ July 25, 2004, 18:00: Message edited by: Thilock_Dominus ]

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Thilock_Dominus:
Just wanna say I've complete the download Mandrake 10.0...next step burning

While I'm at it, I have some questions.

Seems there is alot of filesystems to linux, which one is "best"? and where do I find them? Or should I go with the one which comes with mandrake?

Well, there are a lot of filesystems - some of them are possibly higher performance, some (reiser, I think) provide journaling, etc. If you're new to linux then you probably ought to just go with the default - there's books full of information about filesystems, and I doubt you want to go into them starting off.

I stumble on the web with a program called Wine, is it any good to run M$ application and other windows program with?

The more recent Versions of Wine I've heard some people speak favorably of. Note that with Wine, you generally won't be able to run any of the newer cutting edge games, because Wine will always lag somewhat behind M$ (having to play catchup).

Since I have zero interest in running M$ apps (to the point of uninstalling IE and OE), I wouldn't know about using Wine for that - from what I understand, some apps run okay under Wine, some don't. If you also have a Windoze partition, I'd think you're better off using them from Windoze, but if you get to the point where you're in linux most of the time, I can see where it'd be worthwhile to experiment to see which apps you can Wine and dine.

[nakomus]

On writing to NTFS partitions:
Well the current Linux kernel drivers don’t support writing to NTFS well, there is a tool called Captive NTFS, which loads a windows filesystem driver and runs it in a (Wine-based, I think) emulation, and uses that to give read-write access to NT partitions.

I have used Captive briefly under Debian to fiddle with some files on an XP drive, although I can’t vouch for it beyond that.

Captive NTFS: http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

On distributions: I personally use Debian; the latest network installation disk I downloaded had a friendly menu driven installer and very nice hardware detection. Debian is much easier to install than it used to be (in my opinion at least), but I don't know how it compares with Mandrake and friends.

On drive arrangements: Using a separate drive for Linux is a good way to go; you are much less likely to accidentally clobber your existing file system this way.

With Windows 98 I used to recommend installing your Linux drive as Primary Master and Windows as Primary Slave, and install the LILO (before GRUB was the standard) on the master boot record of the linux drive, with a hook to boot the windows system. This way you could always just disconnect the Linux drive and strap the Windows back to Master and have a system that would at least boot.

My Last attempt to do this with Windows XP however was unsuccessful, Windows has its own boot loader and didn’t seem to be happy about having its drives rearranged. So it looks like your XP C:, Linux D:, etc arrangement is a good one.

One thing to be aware of: In Linux systems drives are identified by there position on the IDE bus, rather C,D,E,etc, so your C: drive would normally be hda, (primary Master), Primary Slave would be hdb, Secondary Master would be hdc, secondary slave would be hdd. Note, that these include CD-ROMS as well, so your drives may not appear in quite the order you expect.

I have no knowledge of how Mandrake’s installer presents disk choices during installation, so the above may or may not be helpful.

You should make sure you have access to a bootable disk with the windows Recovery Console incase you clobber XP’s boot loader. If you have a real MS setup disk this should be on it, but if like me, you just have an OEM recovery disk (grr!), it will probably *not* have Recovery Console. Fortunately, you can download a setup disk on floppies from MS support. Unfortunately, it takes 6 disks.

On the dual boot configuration, I have to admit, I ended up taking the cowards way out. I have XP’s boot loader on the Primary Master (XP) drive and GRUB on a floppy disk. On the floppy disk it works fine and can boot easily into XP or Debian. One neat benefit of this arrangement (and probably others) is that XP’s hibernate to disk function works completely independent of Linux, so I can hibernate XP, restart the machine, boot Linux, work there for awhile, shut down Linux, boot into XP, and come out of Hibernate right where I left off.


Oops, this turned out to be a longer post than I intended. I was going to mention Captive and than quit. Oh well. Good Luck with Linux!

[Gandalf Parker]

If its Linux and Windows XP then wouldnt it be easier to run the WinXP as FAT32 or even just FAT instead of NTFS?