i'm planning to dual OS my computer after my exams. for the past one week or so, i'd been thinking about linux and linux and linux.
there's a few versions or in linux jargon, a few distributions.
some popular distributors are redhat, mandrake, suse and gentoo.
redhat is stopping support for it's desktop version. however, redhat's personnel is behind fedora distribution where everything is freeware. core 3 is coming out in november..
mandrake and suse are well known for being user friendly. suse had been bought over by novell so i'm not too sure about its future. mandrake is coming up with a 10.1 release in november. these 2 aint exactly free...one is expect to make a donation or join a club or something.
gentoo seemed established, it's auto update, portage looked similar to fedora's yum. plus point, no pressure to donate or whatsoever.
just a few concerns from me.
1) the distribution must support all my hardware. i think the most problematic will be my usb modem. i'm thinking of getting a wireless router but that needs $$$
2) i need to share files between MS and linux. i guess fat32 is the way to go however, the kernel seemed to be able to support ntfs in read/write operations safely...
3) i need to reformat/repartition my 2 hard disks. any shortcut? heard that partition magic can convert ntfs to fat32 without losing any data. problem is whether i have the courage to continue without making backup. backing up 100+G of data is no joke.
4) how easy is it to change from one linux distribution to another?
i cant wait to start installing and have some fun (read: frustrations).
Are you vicariously living through me in the hope that my accomplishments will validate your mediocre life and in some way compensate for all of the opportnunities you botched?
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
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2 comments:
Welcome to the club.
think the best part of playing with linux is reading all the documentation, enjoy!
i tink Partition Magic can convert Fat32 to NTFS without loss of data but not the other way round. Tink I read that NTFS cant be reversed?
Tot of dual OS-ing also, but the nitemare of all the crap happening puts me off. Get a 160gb hddisk and backup ur entire hddisk perhaps? Btw, Fat32 maxes out at 4gb when using Windows backup utility and another hddisk imaging utility I tried. I tink it mite be the same for all.
So if u getting new hddisk to backup, make it NTFS if u wanna image ur old data.
-Kman
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