| Mark Warner 2006-08-27, 4:22 pm |
| Chronocidal Charlie wrote:
>
> Jim, I'm not trying to be an old spoil sport or kill joy...
>
> But ;-)
>
> Near as I can grasp, the system you are dreaming of laying out, which
> by the way, I think would be an excellent layout and a system a lot of
> *geeks* would aspire for or to, at what I understand to be your
> current skill level would by like a Biology 101 student going to the
> library, picking up a copy of Gray's Anatomy, taking it home and
> speed reading it, spending a few hours lurking alt.society because a
> couple of wannabe physicians hang out there, buying a set of surgical
> instruments, and setting out to do an advanced craniotomy. ;-)
I understand where Jim's coming from, Charlie. Like so many folks
contemplating giving this a shot, he's wanting to come up with a way to
*guarantee* he doesn't fork up his Windows install. For most, that is an
absolute requirement. In theory, setting up a bootable USB-HDD would be
an ideal way to accomplish that. In practice, it is much more
complicated, will not perform as well, and has just as much chance of
forking up the Windows partition as doing an NTFS shrink and repartition
of the existing drive, or installing to a slave drive. But if that's how
he wants to do it, I'll do what I can to help.
Jim, read my other post downthread about repartitioning your USB. This
is required. The biggest problem that people have when trying to
transition to Linux on a multi-boot configuration is understanding how
to lay out the partitions. The installers will do it for you, but I find
them to be less intuitive and more prone to misinterpretation -- and
disaster -- than using separate tools and getting everything set up
ahead of time. I know you just want to install and have it Just Work;
laying the groundwork as I have described might be tedious and
unfulfilling, but it will help ensure that the end result is what you
want.
If you can be patient, I'll walk you through it step by step. When
you're done repartitioning the drive, post a screenshot so I can double
check that it's laid out the way it should be, and that I've got the
numbering right. It will get tricky later on; getting the bootloader set
up properly will require that you do things totally different than what
you might see documented elsewhere. You may find it better to take this
private: mhwarnerATinsightbbDOTcom.
> Seriously, have you yet actually booted and run one of the live
> distributions for any length of time to really get familiar with it.
> Have you attempted a simple one system install on an older spare
> computer or possibly even a parallel dual boot with simple Windows
> and a simple user friendly Linux distro. Could you cope with a
> situation like several thousand Ubuntu users recently found
> themselves in of having their beloved Linux X-Windows system suddenly
> borked by an upgrade patch and sitting at a *nix command line
> terminal and stuck with having to use the basic building block
> commands of the system to restore it to all it's GUI Glory.
Running a Live CD sure couldn't hurt. It will at least give you an idea
of whether or not you have connectivity out-of-the-box. The state of
Linux wireless support being what it is, that is gonna be iffy. If it
does work, then a *major* hurdle will be averted.
> About four years ago this fellow I know was hell bent on installing
> Linux on a machine, which I believe, was one his mainstay machines,
> and was planning on doing it with an although not elaborate disk
> partitioning system was planning to do something that was at least
> risky. I coached as best I could from a distance and did my damn level
> best at trying to find *kind* *gentle* currently acceptable ways of
> saying *RTFM* and "one step at a time" or if nothing else, simply
> saying "Git down on yo hands and knees boy. Yew need sum more
> *crawling* practice." ;-)
>
> Well, to make a long story short. The procedure failed. I damn near
> lost a budding friendship. Fellow went sour on Linux and posted
> couple of anti-linux rants about us old *shits* being what would have
> turned him away from AA in the beginning if he had encountered our
> *ilk* in his early sobriety.
>
> Fortunately the fellow settled down, mellowed out a tad and took up
> where he had left off and has become in my opinion a *budding* if not
> already full flowered mainstay in the open source arena.
I remember that guy. He wasn't ready for Linux at the time, and at the
time, Linux wasn't ready for him. Both have made major gains, from what
I can gather. I hope Jim is ready; I think Linux is now.
--
Mark Warner
lose .inhibitions when replying
|