On Tuesday 23 November 2004 7:54 pm, Victor Munoz wrote: > It will probably not be possible to buy a laptop without XP installed.
I believe CTL will sell you a laptop without an OS. http://www.ctl.info/ > There's also the issue of the special "recovery" partition somewhere in the > hard disk. And there's the issue of hardware detection. Recovery partition is usually just to recover from suspend-to-disk, though I understand Linux 2.6 has it's own facility for this. > 1. If I naively do a normal boot, then filesystem conversion will take > place, and I will not be able to (easily) resize partitions to make room for > Linux later? Or the only problem with NTFS is that they're read-only? I've resized NTFS partitions using parted. > 2. If I keep XP, then I also have to keep the "recovery" partition. Right? Not that I know of... > 3. If I keep XP, what would be a suitable partition size for it? I will not > really use it, just a backup in case I need to know about some hardware, > until I'm sure sid is working properly with all hardware. Well, the minimum requirements according to Microsoft's page about Win XP Pro's system requirements[1] says that you need at least 1.5GB. Realistically, if you can get what you need in a Windows system in 2GB, you're a bigger geek than I. > 4. A simpler alternative would be to boot first time with Knoppix, which > seems to do a very good job detecting hardware. Learn all I have to learn > with Knoppix, and then delete all partitions and start with a pure Debian > system. Any horror stories out there? That's usually how I check for smoothness: If Knoppix Just Works, Debian's probably going to work. > 5. This recovery partition, is of use only to Windows? The "delete all > partitions" part above is safe if I intend to have Debian only? AFAIK, yes. I accidentally killed the suspend partition on my laptop with no ill effects. [1] http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/upgrading/sysreqs.mspx -- Paul Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ursine.dyndns.org/
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