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Setting up Mandriva - Newbie Questions


Moshe
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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]

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I would have both disks installed at the same time. As you have Windows, then just install Mandriva, and point to the second hard disk. Set your partitions up how you want them.

 

There is no point disconnecting and reconnecting the second disk each time. Just leave it in. That way, it will always allow you to boot Windows/Linux each time you start your system.

 

To ensure that Windows is left as primary and default if no option is selected, at end of install, on summary screen, click button for Boot Loader, and make sure that Windows is selected as the default (marked with asterisk). If not, then edit this entry, and tick the default option.

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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?

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No, don't touch this. You'll lose your Linux installation. Linux partitions show up as unknown in Windows, because Windows doesn't know what they are. Windows doesn't have support for Linux partitions. Unlike Linux, which has support for Windows partitions ;)

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No, don't touch this. You'll lose your Linux installation. Linux partitions show up as unknown in Windows, because Windows doesn't know what they are. Windows doesn't have support for Linux partitions. Unlike Linux, which has support for Windows partitions ;)

 

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

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This depends on what partitions you configured when you set it up. It should at least be using about 2GB, as a normal default install is about this in terms of size.

 

When booted in Linux, use this command to determine used space:

 

df

 

and it'll report the sizes. Also, use this command:

 

free

 

it will show what swap is configured and how big this is as well.

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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

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OK, well, as you can see from here, You have 4GB of your disk allocated to swap, you also have almost 8GB for the / partition, and 218GB for /home. Of which you are using 141MB.

 

You can then check your home directory to see what files you have in here, probably data files, or things you've downloaded, etc perhaps.

 

A neat command to find out what is exactly using the 141MB in /home, is do this:

 

cd /home
du -s `ls`

 

it will display a total of each directory within home. You can then move down a directory into the one that displays the largest, to find out further where all the data exists, for example:

 

cd /home/ian
du -s `ls`

 

and it will list more totalled directories and how much space they take.

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Yeah, you can resize it. What filesystem is it? ext3, reiserfs? Check in /etc/fstab:

 

cat /etc/fstab

 

/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

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Yep, I'd say so too. This link provides some info on resizing ext3 partitions:

 

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q...earch&meta=

 

namely the command resize2fs from the second link. Although if this is a new install, it's probably just as easy to reinstall from scratch and start again, than try to resize.

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Yep, I'd say so too. This link provides some info on resizing ext3 partitions:

 

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q...earch&meta=

 

namely the command resize2fs from the second link. Although if this is a new install, it's probably just as easy to reinstall from scratch and start again, than try to resize.

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

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