Looking for Some Advice

Jason Stephenson jason at sigio.com
Tue May 27 10:13:39 EDT 2003


Tilly, Lawrence wrote:

>    Partitioning Software:  I need something that can split an 18GB 
> NTFS-formatted drive with minimal risk (I have everything backed up, but 
> it was a major PITA last time I needed to have a reinstall done).  A 
> free solution would be preferred, of course, but if there's a licensed 
> product that's far-and-above superior I'll put in the request.

I'll second Ben's suggestion of PowerQuest's Partition Magic. I've never 
had a problem with it, and as he said, the free stuff doesn't work with 
NTFS.

> 
>    Red Hat Linux:  My machine is a Dell Latitude (3 years old, 500mHz, 
> 512MB, ATI Rage Mobility 128 video).  Does anyone have any suggestions 
> as to a good version of RH for a laptop of this vintage?  Is it better 

I run RH 8.0 on my laptop: a Compaq Presario 1200 with 160MB RAM and a 
475(?) MHz AMD K6 (473.189 MHz is what the kernel reports, but I've 
never heard of such a thing otherwise). The video is some Cyberblade 
thing. I have no problems running on this machine. Everything works and 
is zippy enough for me. With the little bit of RAM, it does end up using 
a lot of swap on occasion. You should have no trouble with your hardware 
setup. I've done several installs on Dell laptops and they've usually 
gone quite well.

> to buy a package from the store or am I just as well off downloading and 
> burning the install CDs (I need to make this process as easy to document 
> and duplicate as possible)? I will admit to not following most of the RH 
> specific discussions on this list very closely since I don't run it myself.

I install from CDs that I burn myself. You can go buy it if you prefer. 
You'll want to get the updates. You can either sign up for up2date or 
get them yourself and do the updates how you like.

>    Installed Products:  I will mostly just need a desktop environment, 
> web browser and a mostly-M$-compatible office suite. I have used Gnome 
> and OpenOffice at home, and unless there are any significant reasons for 
> doing otherwise, I would plan to do the same here. Any other apps will 
> be added on an as-needed basis. 

The default WM on RH 8 is Gnome, if I'm not mistaken, with a skin on it 
called Blue Curve. Since my laptop is the only place that I use Gnome, 
I'm not sure how much RH's version differs from the real deal.

OpenOffice is a good choice for office suite. It has good compatibility 
with MS documents. I'd also suggest trying a few others just for 
comparison purposes.

>    Anything Else:  Is there anything else I'm not thinking about 
> (specific boot managers that work better, etc)??

You'll probably need to run the Samba client software to connect to any 
MS servers in your office. Also, don't expect to share files between 
Windows and Linux all that easily with a NTFS partition for Windows. 
Linux can read NTFS partitions and copy data from them, but can't write 
to them, and Windows can't do anything at all with an EXT3FS partition 
except tell you that it's there. (I wonder why no one has written 
drivers for those file systems for Windows, yet? Oh, never mind.;-)

As for boot managers, RH 8 gives you the choice of LILO or GRUB. I 
prefer GRUB, myself. It has many advantages over LILO which are too 
numerous to list here. Also, it's my impression that LILO is being 
phased out by most distros with the majority of them going with GRUB as 
the default boot loader these days.





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