Moshe

worked a treat - run Partition Magic 8 from windows and it recognises the Linux partitions so I just resized it and format the new part under FAT32 filesystem. Ian many thanks for your help with all these:) Any ideas what to do with firefox? I know I have 3 folders, 1 mozilla, 1 mozilla-firefox 1507 and another 1509 how can I get rid of all of them and go for a fresh install of firefox2?

if I startup the machine iwth a Partition Magic Disk will that allow me to resize and format in Fat32?

/dev/sdb1 / ext3 noatime 1 1 /dev/sdb6 /home ext3 noatime 1 2 /dev/sda1 /mnt/win_c ntfs umask=0,nls=utf8,ro 0 0 /dev/sda5 /mnt/win_d ntfs umask=0,nls=utf8,ro 0 0 /dev/sda6 /mnt/win_e vfat umask=0,iocharset=utf8 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/sdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0 from the above I would say the 213GB is ext3 I have also managed to mess up firefox:) i followed the instructions on here to install java and after I linked the plugin to the firefox pllugin folder, it now closes when i open firefox:) oh the joys of finding out new things:) I did try to install firefox2 but it keeps saying it is missing that .so file and have tried eveeerything on the net to get it working to no avail

Could I resize the 218GB /home partition to sthing like 20GB and use the rest as FAT32 space for both systems? being new I hardly believe I will use all that space in Linux at this time

Output from df Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb1 7.7G 4.0G 3.4G 55% / /dev/sdb6 218G 141M 218G 1% /home /dev/sda1 40G 18G 22G 45% /mnt/win_c /dev/sda5 84G 77G 6.2G 93% /mnt/win_d /dev/sda6 31G 26G 4.7G 85% /mnt/win_e Output from free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1035468 385208 650260 0 17700 170800 -/+ buffers/cache: 196708 838760 Swap: 4088500 0 4088500

cheers ian - can't say that surprises me:) the 231gb partition is completely empty though - how is used by linux?

I installed mine and the installation was very easy tbh quite a few options to choose from when it comes to packages to install but that's not bad:) the hard drive was partitioned by Linux so now I have part of the hdd 231gb showing uo in windows as unknown - should I format it as fat32?

downloaded azureus from its main site and followed the instruction on there If I understand you correctly you mean the java plugin that came when i installed Mandriva, which is probably what happened right - that could be correct also:) how can i check this as in firefox it has the option for Java enabled just not in the advanced tab under preferences cheers

Just to add to the above that I downloaded and installed azureus which requires Java and that works fine....??? confused now

Hi people being new excuse my probably stupid question I want to install MrPostman so I can read my hotmail. It requires Java installed which I downloaded the jar file and followed (i believe) the online guide to install and link to mozilla. problem is when I go to the website to check if java has been installed it doesn't play ball. there is a fundamental issue here and that is that I don't know how to install things so following the commands could have worked but sthing might have gone wrong... if any1 could give a hand would be very nice cheers

Cheers Ian I shall let you know how it goes:)

Hey all, have been putting it off for sometime to install Linux but I reckon the time has finally come! Now this is the setup of my PC so hoping you could confirm if the plan will work:) AMD 2800 32bit Mobo is Gigabyte can't remember model though 1GB of RAM SATA 160GB with Windows on it SATA2 (of some size) where I would like to install Linux on ATI 9800 Pro graphics card DVD Player DVD Writer Plan is to install Linux on the 2nd SATA as I don't really want to touch the Windows Drive. Obviously Dual Booting but I would like Windows to be the primary OS and then for me to choose when I wish to run on Linux. Windows is already installed so I won't be touching that. Am I right that I just need to plug in the 2nd SATA drive and put the LINUX Mandriva DVD in the DVD drive and that will start the installation process? Assuming this is done on boot-up? Cheers [moved from everything linux - tyme]