linux 64 + laptop + dual boot

[Shinigami-Sama]

yeah, I'm think of making a dual boot with my laptop that I'll be buying shortly for school <going in for network tech> and I was wondering what the most feasable way of doing it would be, and if it;s worth teh effort, I assume it would be, most newtowrks are based on *nix and it;s even in the learning guide, the system in question is a campact persario,
amd64 3500+
1gb ram, 80gb hdd
link (http://www.staples.ca/ENG/Catalog/cat_sku.asp?CatIds=89%2C90%2C91,425&webid=607373&affixedcode=WW)
you may have to put in a Canadian postal code so use v0r 1k0<not mine :P>

I;ve never used *nix before and seeing as how I;d like it to be dual boot and the lunix section is very bare I put it here, hopefully someone will tell me the basic of how to do this
all I know so far is to make a partistion for lunix, and install it there, but thats all I know so far
thank in advance

[cypher_soundz]

If you havn't used it befroe grab a copy of a Live cd, suse has one.
no installation and the same thing, if the get a nice friendly versino like mandrake(imho) then installing will be very easy.
Hope this helps a bit
Reards
cyph

[Shinigami-Sama]

ahh, well I was kinda looking for a 64bit version, I'm sure finding the actual distro will be easy, live cd eh?
I'll look into that, thanks cypher

[KpeX]

I have an amd64 laptop that I'm very happy running gentoo linux (amd64 arch) on. My recommendations for 64 bit laptops:

64 bit laptops cause two possible difficulties: configuring your laptop's hardware and adjusting to a 64 bit OS. If you're new to linux, start by using the 32 bit version of ubuntu. Ubuntu will help you set up your laptop without much work on your part, and using the 32 bit version will avoid some of the 64 bit headaches (no 64 bit flash plugin, no win32codecs for proprietary formats). Wireless cards are always a bit of fun too. Thanks to ndiswrapper, you can ge pretty much any card working, but if you get lucky there might be an open source driver for your card as well.

Once your feet are wet in the linux world, give ubuntu 64 a shot. If you're really ready to get the most out of your laptop (and put a lot of work in), try Gentoo's amd64 branch.

[Shinigami-Sama]

cool
I"ll keep that in mind
now
for the instaling par
anythign tricky I should be wary of, I should be getting the laptop in a few days, possibly a week if all works out
thank kpex :)

[KpeX]

for the instaling par
anythign tricky I should be wary of, I should be getting the laptop in a few days, Every laptop tends to have tricks, unfortunately I don't have much experience with presarios.

A good starting point is to narrow down your choice to a few specific models and search the make & model on the linuxquestions hardware compatibility list (http://linuxquestions.org/hcl), the LQ forums (http://linuxquestions.org/questions/), or the forum of the distribution you choose (ubuntu and gentoo both have awesome forums). This should get you a basic idea of the laptop's compatibility or issues with linux in general.

One very common problem on laptops when installing ubuntu is getting a 'blank screen' with the installation disk. On many laptops (my averatec 6240 included) this can be solved by adding "vga=771" as a boot option on the install disk.

[Shinigami-Sama]

ahh cool, thanks kpex, I;ve already picked out which laptop I;d like, I have link for it in my orginal post, but this was what I was looking for :)

[Joe Fenton]

After installing, but before it rebooted the first time, I had to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to set the LCD monitor frequency ranges to work properly. Failure to edit the conf resulted in X not launching. Just in case, you should mark down what frequencies (H and V) the LCD on the laptop uses, then double-check the config file before rebooting after the install.

In my case, the LCD on my laptop only works at 60Hz vertical refresh rate. I had to change the line to "VertRefresh 60.0 - 60.0" to make it work right.

[Shinigami-Sama]

ahh thanks for the heads up joe

[six6]

Though I don't have a newer one, I'm posting this from a 32-bit ubuntu-installed Compaq Presario 700. Considering the laptop is new, you may have some issues with minor things, like maybe the smart card reader or the ATI graphics card (though I don't know, I've never owned a computer with an ATI card). But, if you go to any linux specific forums (linuxquestions.org, ubuntuforums.org, forums.gentoo.org) and use Google to search out problems, you should have no trouble finding help.

I also have the 64-bit Ubuntu on a desktop, and it works excellently. As a matter of fact, the first thing I'd do with your laptop is download and try running the Ubuntu 64-bit live CD (http://us.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/5.04/) [ubuntu.com]. That should give you an idea of compatability should you try installing a linux distribution.

In terms of picking the proverbial "right distribution", it'll take some time. I've been through Fedora Core, Debian, Gentoo, and now have settled on Ubuntu. In my opinion:
- Fedora was easy and well put together, though it released too often and didn't support users not "keeping up with the Fedora schedule".
- Debian was easy too, though it didn't release often enough and SID was often times flaky. Other than that, I really like Debian, and wouldn't use anything else for my servers. If I hadn't have found Ubuntu, I'd still be running this.
- Gentoo, well, have fun compiling everything under the sun (read: at least 6-8 hours before you have a working system), updating variables all the time, and spending hours re-compiling things when updates come out or you if want to use a new piece of software. On the other hand, it is a lot of fun digging in, and your system will run more quickly and (maybe) take less hard disk space. Gentoo is definitely the most "involved" distribution of the popular choices.
- Ubuntu is an excellent compromise between Debian and Fedora Core, and at least right now, is staying on top of releasing good, stable, and recent software packages.

[Shinigami-Sama]

ahh cool
right now I"m jsut looking for a copy of partion magic, so I can install it after I format
I'd realy love just to format it all under fat32, so that both windows and ubunto could use the spce but that doesn't seem possible -.-
though maybe partican magic will help that
right now it;s full of crap, itunes, aol, and other deprecated software.
a format is defiantly needed
I'll keep that inmind about gentoo, I'd figured it would be hard to get going, 'specialy seeing as how I have zero linux knowage at current

[stephanV]

Well if you want 2 OSs and a shared partition you need three partitions anyway. I odn't know which version of Windows you are gonna install, but for Win2k or XP I would prefer NTFS. Note that most linux distributions have software available to read from NTFS. Ideally you keep your system partitions for Windows as small as possible anyway, since it will save you a lot of time defragging and keeps it clean.

I am currently dual booting between WinXP and Kubuntu (which is Ubuntu with KDE instead of Gnome.)

I'll tell you my partition layout, maybe it will help you a bit in organizing things.
I have a 40 GB harddisk.

Partition 1: 11 GB NFTS, for Windows XP and stuff I got from Uni. It currently has about 7 GB space occupied. But I will only install stuff on it when I'm sure I will need for a long time.

Partition 2: 22 GB NFTS, for data, music, video and programs I will not use very long. Note that it is rather trivial to mount this partition on Linux, so I always have read acces to the files.

Partition 3: 2 GB FAT32, for swapping files between Linux and Windows. Mostly these files are text files, so 2GB is rather big. But you never know.

Partiton 4+5: 5 GB system and swap partition for Linux. I let the installer program of Kubuntu figure out how big the swap partition should be. I believe its around 0.5 GB and I still have about 2 GB free on the system partition.

As you can see my layout is fairly biased to windows, this is because I need it for uni and Linux is just still a thing to try out, so I kept that small. I can do most things with it though, although I personally think that video encoding is not as comfy as it is on Windows.

And yes, check out hardware support. Im my case I had to install a little program for my graphics card (Intel 855GM) so my screen would use full resolution.

Hope this helps.

[Shinigami-Sama]

ahh
well I'm geting a copy of a partion program soon, I can't rember what it was called
not partion magic, friend requimented another one, a friend that does a lot of partion work, scary amount actualy, well this laptop is for trade school, and I'm going infor network tech, so I need to know linux anyways and a 80gb hdd is a fairly comfy size, plus my pc which is 120gb
and hardware support had nothing for my model
and windows is xp sp2

[Shinigami-Sama]

yeha I;ve given up on ubuntu, it's been 2 days of searching and nothing
it took me 20min to figure out what kpex ment by "vga=771" so I got that running
wen't though the install, everything was good, it didn't like the fact my laptop wasn't hooked up to a network so I just said to ignore it
every installed, gnome came up after it asked me to remove my cd, sure, selected the default to boot to
get to the login screen, touchpad works, keybaord works, I put in my login info, the splash screen loads, stops, sounds sorta comes up, b0rks, everything is frozen
so I;ve been looking htrough LQ and ubuntuforums for the past two days and no-one has an answer to this, all I got was use search, after I read all login related threads

so
long story short
I'm looking for an alternitive distro
I was looking at suse, but I;d liek somethign that is optimazed for an amd (preferable amd64) and is a.) "upgradable" to a 64bit version, or similar to another 64bit distro, so far a could friends jsut tell me to get gentoo64 and skip the middle man, but I don't think he wants to live :rolleyes:

anyways
any other sugestions?
thanks in advance

[Joe Fenton]

I've tried Gentoo, Mandrake, SUSE, Ubuntu, and Fedora Core. I prefer Fedora Core. One plus - it's the development branch for Red Hat. What is in Fedora Core today will be in Red Hat Enterprise tomorrow. Check the Fedora engineers - most of them are Red Hat employees. It's a cutting edge distro, so it usually has the best support for new technology like 64bit systems. I run Fedora Core on a dual Opteron workstation.

I would suggest downloading the FC4 DVD and giving it a try. I always suggest using bittorrent to download FC - it's one of the few distros that uses bittorrent to distribute their stuff, and when you use bt, you can be 100% sure it's a good download. I've had all kinds of problems getting other distros off ftp - I usually have to download an image two or three times before I get a good copy.

http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/

Fedora Core also has an excellent forum in case you need to get questions answered.

http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/index.php?

[Shinigami-Sama]

I kool, I'm just going to try kubuntu and then I'll try fedora, I've seen lots of people switching to it in LQ-ubuntu section because of the install errors
so hopefully this'll do good
thanks joe

alright kububtu gave me the same hanging error so fedora is curently on my togetlisy, toreent is setting, I just hafta set my laptop up bit more on the windows then of to get fedo, hopefuly it won't hang

[riggits]

you might want to look @ KNOPPIX
http://distrowatch.com/knoppix

it's a liveCD thingy, but you can install onto the hard drive. It's pretty good for detecting hardware.

[hellfred]

you might want to look @ KNOPPIX
http://distrowatch.com/knoppix

it's a liveCD thingy, but you can install onto the hard drive. It's pretty good for detecting hardware.
The best part about knoppix is the various ways to "install" it to speed up reading the data of the live CD compressed file system. To circumvent slow I/O via CDRom drive while not having to resize your NTFS partitions to create a new ext2/ext3/ReiserFS etc. linux partiton, one can copy the content of the CD to the NTFS partion while running Windows and advise knoppix to mount the compressed data on the next boot from Knoppix live CD via boot parameter. The NTFS-Partion will be mounted in the save readonly manner, and the compressed filesystem is acessed directly form the much faster HD. By the way, i used to backup the XServer config files (via floppy disc, fat32 partition, network, usbstick etc.) that are created while booting live cd and reuse this on after the hd-Install.
Full HD-Install is available via an interactive shell-skript with GUI-Elements.

Hellfred

[Shinigami-Sama]

well fedora failed on install, it hung no matter my attempted install method
so much for my month's badwidth limit
well I guess I'll try knoppix too then

[hellfred]

well fedora failed on install, it hung no matter my attempted install method
so much for my month's badwidth limit
well I guess I'll try knoppix too then
I suppose, there should be boot-parameters to advise the linux kernel, booting from your install CD, to turn of riscy features (like DMA), or to use special kernel moduls to support hardware on your motherboard, like special scsi or sata host adapters, that are not recognized automatically.
Tell us, when it hung, and what output you god beforehand.
Knoppix main site is here (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html), more infos can be found here (http://www.knoppix.net/) , including an english forum (http://www.knoppix.net/forum/).
A list of the boot parameters, called "Cheat Codes" can be found e.g here (http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Cheat_Codes), and in the ftp directories of the various versions next to the iso images. Go for an elder Knoppix-Version that was still CDRom-based, like e.g. latest v3.9.

Hellfred

[Shinigami-Sama]

I tried turning off pretty much everything I could see that would cause a hang
even tried the text installer
the last screen I saw, it was unpacking everything for isntall, amd_64.dev was the last package that got displayed forboe the hangs
kinda sucks to waste a dvd, these ones were kinda expensive oh well

[hellfred]

I tried turning off pretty much everything I could see that would cause a hang
even tried the text installer
the last screen I saw, it was unpacking everything for isntall, amd_64.dev was the last package that got displayed forboe the hangs
kinda sucks to waste a dvd, these ones were kinda expensive oh well
Did you check the content of the DVD? Maybe the installer has trouble with coppying this special package? Try a minimum x86 32 bit install. If that one works, go for a minimum x86-64.
Test the iso-Image that you have downloaded via checksum. Is the image distributed via bittorrent. It will perform a check of the image, too, and dl only the affected part.
If the image is perfect, try to get an DVD-RW media and retry.
Hellfred

[Shinigami-Sama]

I did a check on the disk, with nero atleast, I did get the files from the torrent, I'm begining to think my laptop doesn't like linux

[hellfred]

I did a check on the disk, with nero atleast, I did get the files from the torrent, I'm begining to think my laptop doesn't like linux
Linux on laptops is always problematic. :(
On top, you are trying to get AMD64 to work.
If it is about learning linux, give up on AMD64 for some time, and start with good old 32bit. Some cracks will most probably face same problems you have, and when you try again in some months, maybe installation will work ride out of the box.

Hellfred

[Shinigami-Sama]

possibly, I think I'm going to grab a copy of redhat, seeing how that prolly going to the majority server I'll be working with once I finish my course