LINUXN00B

OK so I read the FAQ on this site about installation, the one that told me to start from scratch, and I just installed Windows 2000 wiping out all my other stuff. During the install it would not let me allocate drive space for anything other than the max for the windows drive. So now I have Windows installed on all but 8MB of my 20 Gig hard drive. But thats not such a big issue, what I'd like to know is when I'm installing Mandrake and I get the choices to partition I'm lost. I cannot use existing space because there is none. Please tell me what steps to take to allocate say 5 Gigs or so for Linux (keep in mind I want to know how to do it in the Mandrake set up and not anyway else as I have no partition software.) Thanks in advance, this board has been uber helpful , wish there was a way I could contribute funds to this place!

Yeah the virus detection software is in the chip set and I'm using Lilo it looks like, thanks for the xplination as to why it might be detecting one. I'm going to reboot and try the startx command. Thanks all!

I recently had some troubles burnign Mandrake to CDs but thanks to your help I was able to solve those and get Mandrake on 3 CDs. Well now I have installed Mandrake on a dual boot with my current XP config and when I select Linux at the selection screen odd things happen. It goes through a checklist and welcomes me to Mandrake Linux 9.2, which is all fun and good. However after what seems like it's loaded everything I get a login prompt to which I enter my login name and password which I set up in the inital install and then I get this prompt: [john@localhost john]$ I have no idea what I should be putting here at all. Do I need to type a command to enter the GUI side of Mandrake (I installed KDE)? Did I miss something in installation? Here are some odd things that occured during and after setup: 1. After installing Mandrake I made it to the part where it was on "summary" only it hung about 75% of the way through. I figured it would be ok to just reset since it had froze. 2. My on board Virus Checker now detects a virus each startup and asks me what I want to do with choices being "inesrt clean floppy disk and restart or continue booting". It's odd that this only showed up after myMandrak install. Thanks in advance

Don't kill me but I have no idea what the md5sum is

Maybe that will help, these are the options I see and the current ones shown are how I burn the CD:

Yeah when I run Nero 6 I choose the option in the wizard that says "CD-ROM Boot" then once in those options it gives me two choices for the source of the image: 1. Bootable logical drive less than 600 MB or 2. Image File I choose the image file, of course, and then browse for the Mandrake .ISO file and select it. It shows on the bottom as the CD being nearly full at 650 MB and even takes about 15 minutes to burn at 48X. After it burns the CD shows as full if I look at it in Windows Explorer, but it shows no files to look at (which would seem right as it is an ISO disk) But like I said, when the PC boots up it looks for a CD to boot from (As i have set boot to CD as first in the BIOS) and doesn't find one. P.S. I know I can boot from a CD because I just tested it with my Windows XP CD. Oh and I have Nero Burning ROM 6 incase it matters. Thanks in advance!

I'm a student whose trying to prepare for an upcoming UNIX and X-Windows course in which the teacher has asked us to install Linux on our PCs and try it out before the class starts. I have downloaded the 3 ISO images for Mandrake and burned them to CD using Nero. When I put the disk in the drive and boot up the system it checks to boot from CD but does not recognize the ISO files (or something) and just boots to XP instead. I have tried another CD burning engine and tried burning the ISO files as a data CD as well as using the featurein Nero which allows you to burn an image. What am I doing wrong here? I cannot even get started! My PC: Pentium 1.5 Gig 256 RAM Windows XP Pro