(Apologies to Ken - I mistakenly sent an incomplete draft of this email directly to him. Not all linux users are this inept, I promise!)
On 04/05/07, Ken and Jenny Hawley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I was at the Cebit Computer show in Sydney yesterday and spoke to Richard working at the stand. He was most helpful in suggestions which I have now made to work. There were 2 areas that we discussed but I did not write down his comments but still wish to find answers 1. My problem or fear is to install Ubuntu 6.10, which I understand may wipe out the Windows information on my Windows dedicated partitions. Hi Ken
I realise that your questions were about installing linux, and what I'm about to suggest isn't exactly an answer to your question - but I'm not sure if that's because you're not aware of this alternative, or if it's because you're aware of it and aren't interested in it. The Ubuntu installation CD (which you may have been able to pick up at the stand yesterday - if not, you can grab it from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download ) is actually a "Live CD". This means that you can put it in your CD drive and boot directly off the CD into the full desktop linux environment - no need to install anything at all, no need to mess with your hard drive. Of course, it's not the same as going through and installing it: you won't be able to install new software[1] or save settings[2] or documents[3], but it will at least give you a good taste for whether Ubuntu is going to work easily on your hardware, and whether it's going to be a workable solution for you. If you do decide to go ahead and install it, the installer is an icon on the desktop - double-click, answer a few questions, and it's installed. If you're already aware of this, then I've just wasted your time and I apologise. If you're not aware of this though, hopefully I've just opened your eyes to a much easier way to give Linux a try :) [1] Not true[4] - you can install new software, but of course, next time you boot from the CD you'll be back with the default set of programs. This isn't always a bad thing though - it makes a nice test environment, with the comfort of knowing that if you do the wrong thing all you need to do is reboot and everything is back to normal... [2] Not true either. See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCDPersistencefor information about persisting settings across sessions. As a side-effect, this also means you can take a LiveCD + USB key with you, and all your desktop settings+data will travel with you - every machine you sit down to use is suddenly personalised just the way you like... [3] Not true either. Aside from the option in [2], you can always save things to USB keys, to shared FAT32 filesystems as other people have mentioned - and I've heard rumours that you might even be able to save it directly to your windows partition, but I've not tested that myself. [4] You're probably noticing a pattern here... There's really no such thing as being not able to do something on linux - it's always possible, it's just a question of how much work you have to do in order to achieve it... -- There is nothing more worthy of contempt than a man who quotes himself - Zhasper, 2004 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
