Hi,
I'm new at this so if someone could point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate it. I have no idea how to start. I have an old computer with Windows 98 on it. I also have a laptop which is what I use. I would like to do the Linux thing on my old computer. I have basic programming knowledge but what do I need on both computers in order to do this. Do I have to like delete the hard drive on the old computer? If so how do I do this. I know this is a lot of questions but I would love some help.
What programming experience do you have? Which language? How proficient are you with your Windows machines? What do you use them for? www.tldp.org (The Linux Documentation Project) is a good place to start. When I started I wasn't ready to touch my computer: it didn't actually belong to me and other people used it for "real work". Anyway, I downloaded a copy of tomsrtbt (http://www.toms.net/rb/) and got twiddling. I was the only "Live disk" around at the time and it served me well until I knew enough to make a decision about what I wanted out of my computer. These days you can download bootable CDs like Knoppix but, if you want to learn the very basics from the very beginning then tomsrtbt will be sufficient: It fits on a floppy and won't take you long to download. At the time the best guide was Matt Welsh's Installation and Getting Started Guide. You'll find it here: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/gs/gs.html but it's a bit dated now. Again, if you want to learn from the beginning then you may well find it to be a good read. So, Download the guide and have a read. Then, have a play with a "Live disk" or two. When you're happy with all of that you'll be in a good position to decide what kind of "Distribution" you will want. Download a distribution and install it. Maybe try a few different ones. LFS is a distribtuion of sorts but you have to compile it, by hand, yourself, so no one gets anywhere fast the first time they do it. If you're just interested in using your computer as a tool for getting "work" done, rather than learning about computers as a hobby then I'd suggest that you just install something like Ubuntu and be done with it. On the other hand, if you're interested in how operating systems, compilers, editors and other tools work then you've come to the right place: ask as many questions as you like, but try to use google first as you'll find out much more if you investigate for yourself. This is a good read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html Good luck! Regards, @ndy -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.ashurst.eu.org/ -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
