Daniel Pittman wrote:
On 8 Jul 2004, Bill Gladney wrote:
I see all kinds of help files.....in here on this site.....but noticed
there is not one piece of info on how to get this program off a
computer...
That isn't usually such a problem, so people don't document it much. :)
Bill, you clearly are not ready for this. I don't know how you stumbled
onto installing Debian on your system, but if you think that an
operating system is just a program, you *definately* aren't ready for
Debian.
Slap that recovery cd back in. If that doesn't work, get your wallet
out, send the laptop back, or take it to the local computer nerd and pay
him to put windows back on.
Debian is great, but running it on a laptop is probably the most
complicated possible way you could start, considering the horribly
obfuscated hardware, undocumented chipsets, and general level of secrecy
in this highly competitive area of computer manufacturing.
I would rebuild your system for $2000 and that would include full-blown
Debian unstable with the X-Window system, sound, and all drivers, and
also a new copy of Windows, and all updated drivers. Finally, I would
install a small FreeDOS partition for legacy applications. It would take
me about a month to do it, and I would have to spend every spare minute
I'm not at work doing it. I have done this for a couple friends'
laptops, and hence the outrageous quote.
Your best bet: hire a local computer nerd to set up your system like this:
Reasonable Scheme for Laptop Partitioned Hard Drive:
partition 1: FreeDOS - 200M contains the GRUB boot manager menu and files
partition 2: Debian / Whatever: 10G - Some space to play around with
partition 3: Swap partition: Make it 2x your RAM, maybe 500M max
partition 4: Windows: (Rest of Drive) whatever version works best / came
on you laptop
A clever geek can make windows write its swap file to the swap partition
using some rather clever drivers out there. This is pretty cool and
tends to reduce fragmentation on non-linux systems.
