Where are the best "how-to's" on...

[Mike Rambo]

> "Keyes, Randall" wrote:
> 
> We had a NetAdmin meeting yesterday where we were "strongly
> encouraged" to start learning Linux.  The time for my dabbling is at
> an end...I must now get serious.
> 
> I'm trying to install RedHat 7.1 on a system that has W95 on it
> already.  I'm able to get to the little "partition druid" thingy
> window, and I've even tried creating every partition they have listed,
> but it won't let me hit the "next" button.  What gives?
> 
> Where are the best (read: simplest) how-to's on dual-booting
> installs?  I've got to do this on my W2K laptop next.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Randy Keyes
> Network Services, JNL
> 517-367-3976
> randall.keyes@jnli.com
> 
> 

First, you must have unpartitioned space on your hard drive - or a
second hard drive to install to. At minimum you need two partitions for
the linux install. #1 is a swap partition (which has no label but is of
type 'swap' - size is usually at least twice the amount of ram memory).
#2 is the '/' partition and is of type 'linux native' or some such. If
you had the hard drive space and made '/home' a separate partition you
would be able to reinstall the OS, or experiment with different distro's
without loosing data you may have stored in your home directory - but
this is optional. I'd guess that if the next button is not available to
you that you haven't created. or been unable to _successfully_ create,
(do you have the required _unassigned_ hard drive space??) the minimum
partitions for the install.

Dual booting pretty much just happens. I think all the distro's I've
tried (stormix, corel, redhat, mandrake, suse) would all automatically
detect an existing windows partition and set up lilo (or grub) to give
it as a boot option.

Hope this helps -ask more if it doesn't.


-- 
Mike Rambo
mrambo@lsd.k12.mi.us