[via November archive. Charles Lewis]
>Greetings!
>
>I would like to be able to dual boot to Linux on my laptop (Compaq Presario
>1920, P300, 128MB, 4+ GB),and wondered if you guys had any words of wisdom.
>I've installed Debian on a desktop and a server, but I'm still pretty much a
>newbie and I've never setup a dual boot, much less a laptop. On my desktop I
>installed off of the base system floppy disks, and the rest using dselect
>over our LAN. Do I pretty much do the same thing with the laptop?
(dselect, ewww) With the exception of using apt-get as fast as I could grab
that, and console-apt immediately after, that's what I did. Works great :)
>Are there
>any special things about setting up PCMCIA (since I'm depending on it for my
>network connection?
Once you have the first two disks in, assuming you have a supported cardbus
and card, it worked forr me - though I was using a card-based CD, not net,
so I can't say about ftp or NFS install.
>Since I want to do a non-destructive repartition, do you
>guys recommend fips, or should I just bite the bullet and fdisk?
I have had excellent experience with FIPS but I have been careful and did
the following first:
* make sure you have FIPS 2.0, it does right by fat32 disks.
* defrag first so everything is at the front
* you might have to turn off MSwin swapping (buried in control
panel) then defrag and fips, then turn it back on, for best
effect. Not every machine will need that though - only if your
OEM forces swap to the end of the drive.
>What partition sizes do you recommend?
My 3.2 Gb system is partitioned thus:
(unmounted 100 Mb hibernation disk - vfat)
the rest Extended
127 Mb swap (I always do this; you can get away with far less)
127 Mb /
250 Mb /var
remainder /usr
Plus the following symlinks:
home -> /usr/local/homes
tmp -> /var/tmp
If you kept a Gb for MSwin you could simply use the same layout.
At present, I'm using 61% of / (but I have 5 kernels with their module
kits, so that's overboard), 9% of var (no mail stashed there though),
and 39% of /usr. I use X and some graphics, have enlightenment, but not
emacs nor any Office Suites (just mentioning a few things known to eat
disk space up quickly during installs). nedit, lyx and vi, that's me.
>Any tips you might be able to give me
>would be much appreciated.
Hope it helps - have fun!
-* Heather Stern * Starshine Technical Services * [EMAIL PROTECTED] *-
