Re: Former Zoo'er Newbie Needs Help

["Adam Williams" <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> So, I was wondering if you could help a guy (no pun intended) out.

We'll try.

>
> I'm stuck between what to do for distributions.  I am running Win98 right
> now and frankly, am sick and tired of this buggy piece of garbage.  I want
> to run a dual boot system so that I can do most of my productivity stuff on
> Linux (word processing, internet, email, etc) and only use Winblows for what
> I have to (games, web design using Dreamweaver and Fireworks).  I'm not a
> programmer by any means and have no knowledge of Unix.  I would consider
> myself a power Winblows user though and pretty good with hardware (have done
> MB swap, installed many add ons, use ISDN, etc).

Did you use computer back in the DOS or CP/M days?  Have you used ANYTHING
other than Windows?  Sometimes you'll have to "unlearn" things you've learned
in Windows.

>
> Here's my problem.  I'm very taken by Caldera since they have Partition
> Magic (albeit a scaled down version) built in and would make it very easy
> for me to partition my existing drive as well as select my OS at startup.
> However, I'm not too crazy about being stuck with only KDE and the limited
> amount of extras Caldera has in their distro.
>

Understand.  I'd recommend RedHat as the best our of the box solution with a
reasonable number of gizmo's.  It is also the most common distro,  so you'll
have a lot of people here who know they're way around it.

> At Best Buy today I noticed they have a fairly ample Linux section now
> including Caldera, Red Hat and Suse.  I have been really drawn to Suse
> because it looks like a great distro with tons of extras without the Red Hat
> price tag.  However, I figure for me to easily install Suse I'm going to
> have to plunk down $60 for Partition Magic.  I've considered just
> downloading Suse but figured that would be even harder.  Suse is $29 and I
> think Caldera was $39.
>

If you have unallocated disk space  then you should be able to get by without
Partition magic,  although it is a great product.  I'm assuming you know about
drive partitions, primary, logical, etc...

> I've heard about FIPS but I'm concerned about usability.  I understand FIPS
> is a pretty technical program and I think I'd be better of with Partition
> Magic's GUI and Wizards where I just tell it I want it to create a Linux
> partition for install.  Am I wrong?  Also, if I use FIPS am I then using
> LILO for choosing my OS?  Is LILO difficult to use? Are there any other alte
> rnatives?

If you're setup is pretty simple fips should not be a problem.  Just follow the
instructions.  LILO is only a problem if you have REALLY big drives or a
strange BIOS configuration.  The boot partition needs to be in the first 540Mb
of the drive (most of the time),  due to and IDE limitation.  One key to fips
is to a COMPLETE defrag of any partition you intend to shrink that currently is
used by Winblows.

> Any advice would be appreciated,

Take good notes,  it makes it easier for us to solve and problems you run into.