Re: Former Zoo'er Newbie Needs Help

[Bruce Smith <bruce@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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.
> 
> 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.

I use Redhat and am quite happy with it.  I've also tried SuSE (except 
for the very latest version) and that is also a excellent distribution.

Redhat and SuSE are the two distributions that Linus himself uses.
(one at home and the other at work - I forget which is which).

I think you'd be very pleased with either.

I've never tried Caldera, so I can't comment about it.

> 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?

FIPS is one of the most simple programs to use I've ever seen.
You first defragment you hard drive in Win 98, then boot in
dos mode (or from a windoze boot floppy) and run fips.exe.
It lets you select how much you want to shrink your Win 98
partition, and you're done.

LILO is also pretty easy to make work as long as you have
current BIOS that can handle large hard drives (LBA BIOS).
Installing Redhat (and I believe SuSE) will setup your system
for you as a dual boot Linux/Win by default.  Also very easy
if you let the install program do it for you.

At one time I had a System with (4) different copies of Linux,
Win 95, Win NT, SCO Unix, and Solaris i386 all on the same PC, 
using LILO as the only boot manager.  That was a little tricky, 
but LILO is pretty easy if you only want to dual boot Linux and 
Win 98.  I've never used partition magic since LILO has always 
done the job for me.

--------------------------------------------
Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
http://www.armstrong-intl.com/
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