On Mon, Aug 19, 2002 at 11:07:25PM -0700, Jaye Inabnit ke6sls wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > > Greetings: > > I didn't receive a response to my original post, so I am going to proceed > with a Woody install on this laptop ala trail_blazer. My primary concern is > sane installation without destroying the vile native OS (winxp) that is > already installed, coupled with mutual coexistence post install. > > I searched for specific Debian laptop-howtos to no avail. I have never > undertaken a laptop install, so this will mark my induction to the laptop > Linux community. > > If anyone has links of good contemporary laptop info, it would be most > welcome. > > TIA
Welcome, Jaye. I agree with my fellow debian-ite -- for goodness' sake backup your current setup. Many systems come with some sort of recovery disk, but it wipes the drive flat, so it loses all your personal interests such as downloading pictures and song, word processing, stuff like that. After that, use some convenient means to you to split the drive partition into two pieces. You will want to defragment first to get the mswin layout nice and tight near the bottom of the drive - and since most mswin have an uncanny need to put their swap at the end, you'll probably want to turn off swap, and spend a long lunchtime waiting for that defrag-without-swap to complete. To split the drive itself, you'll need a program, there's three reasonable choices available: Partition Magic is a popular commercial package for splitting drives. parted is a free package for doing it, but you'd need some rescue disk that has it to use it, such as the lnx-bbc mini-cd (http://www.lnx-bbc.org/) ... and if you're a newbie parted can be really frustrating. Heck, if you're not it can be frustrating, because it uses different math than fdisk, so comparing them can be a mite odd. FIPS used to be the defacto tool to use. since it works from DOS, so you could just boot a DOS floppy and go for it; hwoever it has not been updated in ages, so if it refused to work on a large size modern disk I wouldn't be too terribly surprised. And I've heard that MS continues its tradiition of making tiny and subtle changes to the FAT filesystem with each package revision. So since you have XP I'd only use it with caution and known good backups handy. If your system uses a CD (I certainly hope so) you shouldn't need to prepare any temp space for Debian bits. Nonetheless I will mention that many people have installed Debian by downloading its bits onto their Windows space, using rawrite to cough up a floppy that boots into the installer, pointing that at the fat filesystem and directory that has their debian-download, and continuing from there. I am told that cdrecord has been ported to windows long since, so if you want to fetch CDs and burn them while you are still a complete windows with lots of disk space, by all means do. Different cd burner instructions were mentioned in one of the Linux Gazette issues: Best of ISO burning under Windows. http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue68/tag/11.html Debian cd images, and some tricks for downloading these huge globs more safely than just praying 650 Mb is going to survive in one trip can be found at: http://cdimage.debian.org/ I have to say, jigdo is way cool. Anyways, one way or another having gotten yourself a boot floppy or bootable CD for Debian ready, then you can install, and when you partition, you can take the abandoned D: or spare space on the disk (depending on how you did this) and re-allocate it to debian. You'll want at least a small partition for swap - people like to recommend about twice the size of memory - and in the simplest configuration, the rest to be mounted as the / directory. That should be enough to get you going. At this point it's selecting packages that can be tricky, and I strongly recommend that you install aptitude (a menu driven apt-getter) or deity if it's available (more friendly looking, but floats in and out of being in the unstable branch only). -* Heather Stern * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * The Answer Gang's Editor Gal *- The Linux Gazette (http://www.linuxgazette.com) is under the LDP
