[TriLUG] A true newbie

[Jon Carnes]

 --- Original Message: Tuesday 30 April 2002 03:02 pm ---
> I figured I'd jump in here. I've monitored this list for a few days, and I
> have to say most of the stuff that ya'll have been talking about is over my
> head. However, I love a challenge and I'm extremely interested in
> Installfest.

Well you should consider going to the Installfest!  The folks there will help 
you get linux on your box - and hopefully do it without blowing away your 
Win2k partition.

They'll have to shrink the current partition (and I think the lug has a copy 
of Partition magic...) to make room for the Linux.  Linux will need a minimum 
of two partitions.  One for swap and one for data.

>
> My newbie questions: I have a nice computer (PIII/750) that is running
> Win2k. From what I've read so far, there's a way to have both running on
> the same machine. Can I keep my current installation and load Linux under
> it's own partition or do I need to wipe out everything and start fresh? How
> much disk space (optimally) does Linux use? I guess I need to share that I
> would like to also eventually install Apache/PHP/MySQL under Linux for web
> development if that makes a difference. I also have no clue what
> installation version would be best for me to use.

I would recommend that you use either Mandrake (version 8.2) or RedHat 
(version 7.2 - apply updates please!).  Mandrake is much easier to manuever 
in than RH (if you are used to the world of windows). 

Total space you'll need will be somewhere around: 
  250Mb for swap
  2Gb for / - everything mounted off of the root.

X/KDE/PHP/MySQL/Apache are going to eat some space, so you might consider 
bumping up the space to 4Gb for root.

If 4Gb is too much, you can probably slim down the install with some 
judicious cuts, but I have a feeling that you'll be more at home inside a GUI 
than with working from the command line.  

Best of luck!

Jon Carnes