[steveie85]

I have a copy of Ubuntu and Puppy Linux, what one is best? How do I get my computer to install Linux to a seperat partition on my hard drive and give me the option to boot from either one? Any help is appreciated.

[Jason Ess]

I rally can only help with the first question
Ubuntu is awesome

[steveie85]

Ok thank you for that. Do you have a link so I can get the latest stuff? Like I said I am new to all this!!

[RobLinux]

Puppy Linux is a small lite distro, it works well booting from flash drives. It's not a "pretty" eye candy type thing, but something to get job done on a low power system.

Ubuntu is the most popular general purpose distro, and is aimed at ease of use, and does have eye candy. More familiar to Windows users.

So depends on your requirements, they're very different. Ubuntu needs something like 390MB RAM to install, and much more memory to run well than Puppy. Other general purpose distro's can feature text mode installers, or support for swap partitions early in install process, reducing the RAM requirements to around 240MB.

[steveie85]

I want something that isn't going to be difficult and will run great on 512MB. From the sounds of it Ubuntu sounds like the best.

[RobLinux]

If you find Ubuntu won't boot into the installer, OpenSuSE 10.3 is worth a try now, they have stabilised the kernel which was giving me grief a month back. The PC Linux OS seems quite popular with some to.

[steveie85]

If I want to dual boot system do I need to have any special stuff for the computer?

[RobLinux]

No, you should read an appropriate dual Boot resource , for you circumstance ie. 1 disk Windows / Linux, or 2 disks 1 Windows, Linux. Try not to get confused by all the possibilities, start very simply, and then add to a working config ie. a 2nd Linux distro is easy to add later to your GRUB config.

If you are dual booting with a version of windows, make sure you have their media handy to, as well as a Linux Live (or Rescue) system CD, that'll let you edit Grub entries if you get something wrong and can't boot Linux off disk any more.

[GNOME32]

The answer to the question about "special stuff" is no, you don't need anything special to set up a dual boot.

If you're still confused about how to install a Linux distro with a dual-boot, I can write a guide for you.

[steveie85]

I am just finally getting around to look for stuff that will help install Linux in a dual boot setting. I will for sure ask if I can't find anything.

[RootbeaR]

Try Puppy.

You don't even have to install it. You always run it from CD.

When you use it, you will configure it the way you like it.

When you shut down, you will be asked if you want to create a "file" on the hard drive.

If you say yes, it creates a partition (can't remember if you get to specify size or not)

and stores your settings there. Next time you fire up the disc, it loads according to your

previously saved settings.

I believe it comes with tools necessary to partition disc further if you like so you can store

Docs or whatever.

[fiftyfour]

Ubuntu is user friendly and the debian apt system is quite easy to use. I haven't used puppy linux personally - will have to try some time.

As for openSuse, I think I didn't like how it handled source and packaging -- YaST is great for configuration but the package management is a tad on the unintuitive side. Also the glibc seems to be broken for 10.3.

Personally I use Debian 4.0 for my desktop. Maybe you should look around a bit more and try a few yourself, what suits you is the best...

[RobLinux]

Originally Posted by fiftyfour

As for openSuse, I think I didn't like how it handled source and packaging -- YaST is great for configuration but the package management is a tad on the unintuitive side. Also the glibc seems to be broken for 10.3

AFAIK glibc always been fine, there was a duff kernel provided by update which caused a lot of problems.

On the package management, may be what we're used to. I tend to struggle a bit more in Ubuntu, for instance it took me a while to get comfortable with the search in Synaptic, at first I'd just not get anything useful out of it. SuSE has so many packages availalbe, I'm quite glad of categories. There's a few different views, one simplistic used by default in install, that hides a lot of the possibiltites.

There were 2 reasons, I've pretty much given up on Ubuntu as desktop OS. The main one is GNOME, try as I might (and I used version 1, I hate the results of Havoc Pennington's usability experts, I struggle to find what I actually want to do, just the most basic options). The second, was subtle breakage and unmaintainability between packages and start up, which tended to cost me time debugging, the less common kind of things.

Eweek has two short articles, reviewing distro's from different points of view. They seemed reasonably fair and are not one dimensional, open Jason Brooks review of "the powerhouse trio", and then for a different take the community one. There's some screenshots to, more or less useful of various releases.

[WARnux]

From the little bit I played around with PC Linux OS, it seems to be easier to use than Ubuntu and...it uses KDE instead of GNOME.

[Carlton]

Any Linux distro will run fine on 512MB ram. At the moment, I can't think or any distro that won't help you either create a new partition to install on or allow you to resize your windows partition. If you choose to do it yourself, you'll need to make 3 partitions. "/" is the root partition and will need 4 gig minimum, 10 will do fine. "/home" is where your files will be saved. Give your self a couple gig for that at least. With 512 ram, make about a 1gig swap partition.

Grub, (sometimes Lilo) are Linux boot loaders that will detect and configure other OS's so that when you ower on your PC, you can select which OS to boot.

Since your just starting, I'd recommend Ubuntu or openSuse. Some distro's like Fedora are great but you'll have to add other OS's to the Grub menu yourself.