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Linux Links : : : Deathmarch Part 1 , Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 : : : Ownage : : : Bigger and Better : : : Debian and Others (on the CSx) : : : Toshiba Debian |
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At Long Last, Linux |
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For my encore, I decided to make life a bit easier on myself by
picking a machine that was actually capable of installing from a
CD. What I got was a Dell
Latitude CSX. This is a very nice, modern-looking laptop. The
CD and floppy drives are external so that what's left is extra-slim.
I bought it from e-bay and it had Win2K Pro installed on it to start
with. Bonus!
Freed from the necessity of faffing about with rawrite and a wheelbarrowful of floppies, I was able to start almost immediately. I wanted to keep the Win2K on a partition because you never know when it might come in handy. I didn't want it hogging any space though, so I started by uninstalling everything superfluous, cleaning up the disk and defragging it to cram the Windows installation into the smallest possible amount of space. I added a bit on top for data and stuff I'll probably need sooner or later. Then I installed Partition Magic 8 and its little brother Boot Magic (included on the same disk) and set up a primary linux partition and an extended partition consisting of some swap space and 3 logical partitions. How hard is this? Well, it's pure jam! Not a problem in the world. The only tricky bit is how big you want your partitions to be. You can see below (scroll down a bit!) how much space I allocated for each. Again, for the benefit of any newbies reading this, please note I am not an authority on disk partitioning so don't go thinking this is a guide to follow. Probably Linux wizards reading this are pissing themselves with laughter even as you read. (Note written a bit later: Yes. It's all cobblers) Partition Magic ran its course, rebooted and began the work of carving up the disk. It took a while but it's a great program and it did the whole thing flawlessly. The next step, of course, was to install Slackware itself. I had a copy of Slackware 9.0 from the cover of Linux Format or something. As with the floppy installation, there is a certain amount of manual configuration to do before you start the installation proper but it walks you through the whole thing, so it's all pretty painless. The root and boot images are all included on the CD itself so now swapping of floppies is necessary. The setup installs a working system to get you through the initial prep. The first choice is a keyboard map. Generally, for UK users this will be QWERTY-UK.map (Not the US version which is slightly different and gives you " in place of @ and vice-versa. After that you need to type 'setup' to access the menu of items to attend to. First comes the process of setting up partitions. Linux partitions aren't labeled with letters like DOS ones. Instead, the main partition is called hda and its partitions are hda1, hda2, etc. Accordingly, my swap partition was called hda5 and occupied 700MB. This is the first one you set up. The installation program detects the swap partition I created earlier and formats it. Next, the remaining partitions are formatted in turn and allocated to various directories of the linux file system as follows:
Although Partition Magic had already set up the partitions to use
ext2 (The usual Linux filesystem just as DOS/Windows uses FAT32),
I decided to accept the suggestion of reformatting them with ReiserFS,
which has the advantage of journaling, which avoids data loss in
the event of a crash. (NB, I actually got to test this after a few
days by making some ridiculous user error. Now, I'm setting up a dual-boot system so the setup asks me do I want to add my DOS partition to 'etc/fstab' (which I gather is some sort of map of the file system) so that I can 'see' them from within Linux. In fact, I don't because the partition in question is just the bootmagic partition. Windows 2000 is running on NTFS. However, if you are doing a dual boot you might find this handy. Certainly it doesn't work the other way around. You can't access Linux files from within Windows. The next step is my favourite. You get a choice of which bits of software you want to install. Don't believe the hype. Linux users will tell you that Windows is bloatware and installs far too much surplus trash. Well, maybe so, but there are a few Linux distros that have to be spread across multiple disks because they're too insanely over-inflated to fit on one. Slackware isn't that bad but if I can get away without 8 word processor packages I'll be quite pleased. So, I select from the various 'disk sets' as they're called... A - You need this. trust me. I pick 'expert' as my choice of install option. Why? well, it's better than the 'install everything' option because it recommends certain packages and you can review them all. I don't delete any of the recommended options (with the exception of netscape communicator (because who needs Netscape and Mozilla???) but i did add a few extra bits and bobs. For example, the MySQL database server (part of the AP disk set) is not one of the recommendations but I added it because it is a top-notch little ball of fire. Actually, this may have been unnecessary because there's a new version of MySQL out and so this one is probably out of date but I reckon it will take me a while to work out how to download and install the new one so I'll stick with this for a while at least and update whenever I can. Ditto for PHP and Samba (from N) and some other bits and bobs. If you have a big hard drive, just install everything. Go on! Have fun! Once that's taken care of and the packages are all installed, I am asked a lot of impertinent questions such as um - which kernel do I want (default, please!) do I want to install LILO (Yep!) with the framebuffer console (yep again!) where would I like LILO installed (root) do I want to make a bootdisk (yes), do I want to activate hotplugging (yes) do i want to set up a modem (no. I've only got PCMCIA network card and no modem), do I want LILO to be installed (No because bootmagic will handle that), what kind of mouse am I using (the laptop pointer acts as a PS/2 mouse), do I want cut-and-paste (why wouldn't I?), do I want to set up my network (which sounds like a good thing but rapidly becomes a bit confusing so I bail out and resolve to do it through the GUI later), what screen font do I want (a choice of various almost-the-same fonts for use in command-line mode - I choose gr737b - something something medieval something...), what's the local time (I select 'no' and then Europe/London from the list), what desktop manager do I want (Gnome), what password do I want (got to have a password, y'know) Finished. Done. Dusted, with a boot disk made. I reboot and...well, barring a bit of faffing around with Boot Magic which I won't go into now, it works perfectly. Starting up the graphical user interface (By typing 'startx'), I get an eyeful of the famous KDE desktop. There is an option to configure Lilo which looks promising. I think maybe I can set it up to give me a dual boot option. It almost does but at the last minute decides there's a mistake and I am prevented from doing it. Oddly enough, the only way I know of getting back into Windows is the old-fashioned way, by running FDISK from a command line and moving the 'bootable' flag in the appropriate column so that it resides next to Win2k instead of the primary Linux partition. Once back into Windows, I can install boot magic. this can only
be done on a FAT32 partition so I have to make one specially. My first impressions of Slackware are very positive. I'll be expanding on this further later when I've got to know it a bit better. However, I was impressed that it detected most of the hardware without question (not as good as XP but better than Win98). It seems to display colour well (about as well as windows, anyway, with the bog standard display adaptor) and the sound seems to work OK too. I am well chuffed to hear that Linux supports my digital camera. This is great because there actually isn't a driver for it under Windows XP no matter where you look! On the down side, Slackware seems to be having trouble identifying the network (PCMCIA) card and as a result I haven't been able to get it on the net yet. Setting these two up are my top priority now. There are a few other issues. the various administrative tools and applets seem to be very ready to give me error messages, which can't be good. Solving this sort of problem is how I got the hang of Windows 98. At first they seemed insurmountable but then you crack them and the whole thing seems easy and familiar. I'm quite looking forward to the challenge. |
OK,
so after my completely failed and pathetic attempt to install Slackware
on the little etch-a-sketch, was I put off? No sir, I was not. Daunted?
Indeed, no.
The
machine choked but when it came back it just spent a little while
sorting through the records of what had happened before the crash,
then it fixed everything and carried on as normal. Nice.) 
My
partition table is now in more bits than a coffee table at Chuck
Norris's house. In case you haven't seen anything like this before,
I'll just run through it. The multicoloured bar in the picture to
the left represents the laptop's hard drive, which is about 12 GB
in total and divided into bits ('partitions') which act like individual
hard drives even though they're not. The pink area is the partition
where the Win2K installation lives. It's NTFS (Network Technology
File System) which is a pretty stable format used mainly by more
solid, sturdy Windows machines. The small green area is a miniature
FAT32 partition where Boot Magic lives. When the computer is turned
on, this is the bit that handles the first bit of the boot process
and gives the user the opportunity of choosing between the two systems.
Next up is the primary Linux partition which handles all the main
bits of the Linux operating system. Everything in the turquoise
section is part of the extended partition, which can contain several
logical partitions. in this case, that's 4 logical linux partitions,
one of which (the brown one) is a swap partition.