On 7/22/2011 9:53 PM, CJoeB wrote:
Because this will be a new computer and I may essentially void the warranty if I alter the pre-configuration, I seriously thought about leaving the status quo and putting up with Windows 7. However, I would lose practically as much as losing my first born! I would have to put up with all the things that bug me about Windows and I wouldn't have all the programs that I love in Linux.
If you are truly concerned about the warranty issue then you would, of course, want to have someone read the actual warrant paperwork that you have. However, typically the only way to void a hardware warranty is to tamper with the hardware.
If you replace Windows with Linux on a new PC, you will may lose any free technical support (for software, drivers, etc( you may be entitled to as long as you continue to run this "unsupported" condition. But if you actually have faulty hardware, they aren't going to refuse to replace or repair it just because you installed software. Plus, Dell in particular "supports" Linux in a marginally useful way on some of their laptops, so they do have self-help information that would be relevant to you on their site.
In the worst case, if you needed to ship your machine back to the manufacturer for repairs, you should receive a set of restore media with any new PC that would allow you to put your system back to factory default, and make your manufacturer more than satisfied.
What would you recommend that I used for the iso an stage 3? As a reminder my computer is a Dell XPS 8300 with an Intel Core -i7-2600 processor. I'm a little confused between the choices x86 (which seems to only apply to Pentium 4 systems and only utilizes 32-bit processing), amd64 and ia64.
"x86" is the name for 32-bit PC processor architecture, such as the older Pentium family, that has been around for decades. (They originally had Intel model numbers like 8086, 80386, 80486, etc.) Very few new PCs are x86 natively, but they will run programs that are meant for x86 machines. This one will "work" on your Core i7 but is probably not the best choice.
"amd64" is the name for the 64-bit PC processor architecture, like the Intel Core family processor you have. This is what you'll want to get for your machine. (It's called "amd64" in Gentoo because it was originally produced by AMD, but Intel and AMD's current 64-bit processors are compatible and run the same software. Other operating systems call this "x64", but it's the same exact hardware.) An x64-based CPU will run x86 programs, but for a source-based distribution like Gentoo there isn't really much benefit to doing so.
"ia64" is an older and mostly-obsolete Intel attempt at 64-bit processing that was completely incompatible with x86, and came and went very quickly. You can ignore it.
