Hello fellow Debianers, I have recently bought a new laptop (it finally came yesterday) and want to put Linux on it. It's a Dell Inspiron 4150:
1.6GHz P4 14.1 XGA LCD 1024x768 screen 256+182MB Ram 32MB ATI Radeon 7500c DVD/CD-RW combo drive floppy drive swappable with the DVD/CD-RW combo 20GB HD soundcard (Crystal chipset) 56.6k V90 internal modem & network adapter combo Now, I have the Debian 3.0 woody DVD which I've installed on my desktop PC but I've never done the installation on a laptop. I know there's a lot of info scattered all over the show out there but I haven't seen any info on the Inspiron 4150. The reason why I chose it is because other people with different Inspirons have managed to get everything working (with the possible exception of the modem). I compared the other specs and it seems that I should at least be able to get X, sound, DVD playback and CD writing working. It may be a little harder with the modem and network card. Initially, I have the following questions: 1. How do I resize the other operating system's partition (it's the XP variety) without having to reinstall? The only reason why I need to do this instead of just wiping out completely is so because I don't really want to fiddle with the other OS, I wouldn't know where to start. When I get everything working under Linux, I'm going to wipe the other OS anyway. 2. When the installation asks me to make a boot floppy, I _KNOW_ that I should do it. But, the DVD will be in the drive at the time so I won't have a floppy. How do I go round this problem? 3. I typically have different partitions for /, /boot, /usr, /usr/local, /home, /tmp and /var. Should I do this with my laptop or should I stick with one big partition and a swap partition? Is it advisable to have multiple partitions on a laptop? 4. Is there anyone out there that has installed Debian on an Inspiron 4150? What did you do about this hibernate partition that I hear people talking about? OK, that's it for now, looking forward to your feedback. spizkapa
