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Author Topic: Re: Linux - Something to make you smile  (Read 16742 times)

roseway

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #15 on: November 30, 2007, 07:27:59 AM »

>> What on earth does that mean?

The layout of the keyboard settings ie UK or US etc.   If you have the US layout then certain keys are in a different postion - off the top of my head the most common ones are " above the 2 for UK and @ are in different places.  Therefore just like in Windows you have to set the country setting for the keyboard.



Yes, that's the keyboard layout part. The more general part is the 'locale' which refers to all the country-specific settings such as number, currency and date formats. In the Linux world (and elsewhere) this is called i18n which is shorthand for the 20-letter word 'internationalisation'. Linux distros come with a host of software packages called i18n-something and the appropriate ones should be installed for the country which you select during installation. Mepis doesn't currently do this correctly, so after installation you have to manually install a couple of packages with i18n-en_GB in their names, which is easy enough to do.
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roseway

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #16 on: November 30, 2007, 07:38:45 AM »

One small trap for the unwary with ISO images is that you must write them to CD as images, not as data files. In effect it's a bit-by-bit, track-by-track copy of the raw data on the CD or DVD, and to reconstruct the hierarchy of directories and files on the original the image has to be written as raw data, not as a file. (This is very similar to restoring a Ghost image of a hard disk.)

If you're using Windows CD writing software, there are one or two programs which don't have this capability, although most do. Nero certainly does; I have a feeling that Microsoft's own efforts don't, but I may be wrong.
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jabns

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #17 on: November 30, 2007, 07:40:36 AM »

If you are a bit unsure i would recommend testing the installation and then the OS in VMware: Linky

Just click the evaluate and you should get it for 30days. My recommendation would be to try installing as many as you can in the 30 days and test to see which one suites your needs. Also some distros have "Live CDs" where you can boot into them(that would be a good idea to see if it picks up your hardware correctly).

EDIT: If you "mess up" in VMware you are ot going to loose any data  :)

James
« Last Edit: November 30, 2007, 07:47:50 AM by jabns »
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roseway

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #18 on: November 30, 2007, 08:23:11 AM »

Yes, and in fact you could use VMWare Server which is completely free for personal use, and has most of the features of the full VMWare product.
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Floydoid

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #19 on: November 30, 2007, 09:10:13 AM »

you must write them to CD

Oh well that puts the tin lid on it then... when I first got a CD writer I never did get to grips with how to use the Nero software to write CD's so I just gave up on it.
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jabns

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #20 on: November 30, 2007, 09:56:33 AM »

Good point roseway. I forgot about that one  :) .

Shame that you are giving in on linux but i have one last suggestion:

https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

They will ship the CD to you for free(takes a couple of weeks usually).

Roseway might be able to tell you where to get more of the distros this way?

James
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roseway

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #21 on: November 30, 2007, 10:06:02 AM »

Don't give up just yet. If you install VMWare Server (or Workstation), one of its options is to install a guest OS using an ISO image as the installation source. This works very well, and you don't need a CD at all.

Jabns is quite right about Ubuntu, and that would be a good option. You can also buy Linux CDs and DVDs at modest prices from places like http://www.thelinuxshop.co.uk/catalog/index.php .
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Floydoid

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #22 on: November 30, 2007, 01:17:57 PM »

Thanks for all the info guys, but it all seems a bit too complicated for me.
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roseway

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #23 on: November 30, 2007, 03:50:42 PM »

Fair enough, and if you change your mind we'll always try to help. :)
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Floydoid

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #24 on: November 30, 2007, 04:33:43 PM »

Actually on second thoughts a live cd version seems tempting... just one inane question - if you are going to install Linux on a drive, does it need to be formatted to fat23, NTFS or some other file system, and what size of drive would be the minimum requirement just to play with it?
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roseway

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #25 on: November 30, 2007, 04:59:36 PM »

The live CD is standalone of course, and doesn't touch the hard drive. If you want to install it the installer will set up the necessary partitions for you and format them as required. NTFS and FAT32 are no use to Linux, because they don't have the necessary support for file permissions, which is a basic part of Linux security.

You need two partitions for Linux, one for the normal files and one for swap. (Linux can use a swap file instead of a separate swap partition, but a separate partition gives better performance. It's normally recommended that the swap partition is twice the size of your memory, but 512 MB is big enough for all normal purposes. For the main partition you probably need 3 GB for a modern system, although some lightweight distros fit into a lot less.
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Floydoid

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #26 on: November 30, 2007, 05:39:53 PM »

Ah because I have some redundant 6 gig drives, so Linux would work on one of those?
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roseway

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #27 on: November 30, 2007, 06:35:12 PM »

That would be fine.
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Floydoid

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #28 on: November 30, 2007, 06:42:52 PM »

So the Linux installation will set up the partitions and file system?
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roseway

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Re: Linux - Something to make you smile
« Reply #29 on: November 30, 2007, 07:12:58 PM »

Yes, and if you're giving it the entire 6 GB hard disk you can just tell it to use the whole disk and leave it to get on with it - you don't need to make any decisions about partitioning. If there are other hard disks in the PC you will need to confirm which one to use (be careful of course), but it should be clear from the description you'll be given. Hard disks are given names like hda, hdb, etc or sda, sdb, etc, where 'a' is the first one, 'b' is the second, etc. (oversimplification, but near enough).
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