CHristopher Baird wrote:
> I have decided i want to Try linux i have made a 2 Gig partition on my
> hardrive for it. i use windows XP can i install linux from my Primary
> partition to the 2nd one and if so how do i also make it dual boot and
> which linux should i get for a newbie like me
>
>

First of all, you will want (at least) two partitions for Linux: one for
swap, and one for everything else. One way people estimate the size of
the swap partition is to just use double your RAM size. You can get by
without a swap partition, but you probably will not like it.

I know it is possible to install Linux from another partition on a disk
drive, but I have never done it and I do not know how. If you choose to
get a distribution from Red Hat, the instruction book will tell you how
to do that.

2Gig is kind of small for most Linux distributions these days. If you
have never used UNIX or Linux before, chances are you will want a GUI,
and that takes quite a bit of space. You would probably be better off
with 4 GBytes. Consider buying another hard drive and install Linux on
that. I do not believe you could get a hard drive smaller than about 60
GBytes these days, and for IDE (and its friends), they would cost under
$100. I am putting together a new machine that has an 80 GByte Maxtor
drive with 8MByte cache that was about $90 including shipping. (The
machine also has 4 20GByte Ultra/320 SCSI hard drives.)

Presumably there are distributions of Linux that will take less space.
One way to save space if you get one like Red Hat 9.0 or Fedora, is to
not load anything you will not need. One web browser should be enough,
for example. If you do not need spreadsheets, do not install them, etc.
If you want a GUI, pick one (KDE and GNOME are the most popular, but
resource hungry) and do not install the other.

Another way to save some space, if you are willing to do a lot of
learning all at once, is to omit the X Window system, GNOME, and KDE,
and use a command line interface, probably the bash shell. Even if you
do use a GUI, you will probably open up at least one window within which
you run a CLI anyhow.

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ Registered Machine 73926.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 9:10am up 16 days, 21:54, 2 users, load average: 2.41, 2.27, 2.16