The Great Linux Adventure : Pre-Installation

I have been toying with the idea of a switch to Linux for ages and yet, somehow, have never gotten around to it. I've had copies of Red Hat, I bought a copy of SuSe 9.3 and yesterday a copy of SuSe 10.0 from The Linux Shop arrived. CJ was running Linux on a dual boot system before he switched to a Mac (and hence OS X) and I've decided the time has come to try to set my machine up dual boot as a first step on the potential road to weaning myself away from the Microsoft teat.

Normally I am pretty gung-ho about installing stuff and seeing what happens but I think a Linux dual boot install might need to be treated with a little more respect so, right now, I am writing this from Camie's machine (fortuitously they are both sitting in the erstwhile Dining Room while we redecorate our studies) as my machine backs up to the Western Digital external drive I purchased to keep our data off site whilst we were away on our world trip.

Second step of preparation is probably to audit the hardware I have in my machine (in theory to check drivers exist).

And the third, related step, is to unplug things that are not essential and then drop them back in as required until everything breaks :-).

NN

Hardware Audit for Thor
Component	Make and Model	Unplug?
Case	Qbic Soltek EQ3801M Mini Case	N
CPU	AMD Athlon 3400+ 64	N
Memory	1GB PC3200 400DDR
Primary Hard Drive	250GB Maxtor 7Y250M0 7200rpm 8MB Cache SATA	N
Secondary Hard Drive	120GB Maxtor 6Y120L0
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon 9800 Pro	N
Monitor	Iiyama Vision Master Pro 452	N
Optical Drive	Lite-On SOHW-812S DVD-RW	N
Keyboard	Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro USB/PS2	N
Mouse	Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 USB/PS2	N
Network	DLink DWL-G520 Wireless Adapter	N
Printer	Epson Stylus Color 600	Y
External Storage	Western Digital 250GB	Y
USB Key Ring	IOmega Micro Mini 64MB	Y
P800 Cradle	SonyEricsson ??	Y

Finally, I've dropped the first Suse CD into this machine to take a gander at the "docu" directory and copy the docs across to this machine's hard drive, let's take a look...

OK, so I have a single 250GB NTFS partition on my primary hard drive. The manual states that it needs to be error checked and then defragmented including moving all the files moved to the start of the disk before using Yast (the Suse partitioning tool). Let's get that started...

- Scan Disk completes with no errors

- Defrag shows that my swap file is scattered around my disk and the manual indicates this should be removed before the defrag. (Control Panel\Advanced\Performance Settings\Advanced\Virtual Memory). Done and system restarted. OK, I still have one slice of "unmoveable files". Let's try a defrag and consolidate anyhow.
It also states that one will only have read-only access to NTFS from Linux, well let's worry about that one later.

It seems to think 4GB is a generous portion for a Linux partition and Windows reports 162GB free so I guess I'll give Linux 25GB to be going on with.

Almost forgot to take the wireless network card out...I'm going to start with the external adapter that plugs into the motherboard ethernet adapter instead I think.

Well, the defrag is still running and I am having trouble getting the wireless adapter to work so I am going to post this and take a break. More soon.