When I went out and bought myself a laptop with no O/S installed, I got some strange look and people asking me why I wanted to spend £320 on a laptop that has nothing on it. My reply is “I want a laptop to do what I want to do and not what everyone else wants to see or work”.
Special delivery arrives and there is my brand new laptop. I unpack it and all I have is the machine, PSU, handbook and a disc. I then went through the normal things, charging and preparing for installing the O/S`s.
First I installed a copy of XP that I had but never used. No problems there, all the updates and motherboard drivers installed and I was away. One laptop with XP installed.
Now I am not very happy at this point as I would rather use Linux. So now it is time to install my Linux O/S. My choice is openSUSE and at the time it was version 11.2. Now before you ask why I installed XP first, this is because with a dual boot machine it is better to install the FAT32/NTFS first. This also helps set up the grub boot loader in Linux.
So armed with my openSUSE DVD I rebooted the laptop and let it boot from the disc. OpenSUSE boot options appear and I select the installation option. This in turn loads a Linux kernel and proceeds to the install section. This can be quite daunting if you have never installed Linux before or you start to worry whether it is going to overwrite your windows that you have already installed. You are now presented with a graphical install screen, select your country, e.g. UK and then continue.
It will then check your machine and ask you what graphical desktop you want to use, e.g. KDE, Gnome. Linux is different to windows in that respect as the desktop is only another program running on top of the kernel, hence different desktops. I selected KDE and continued. This then checks again and comes up with a standard program list for a running O/S.
The partitioner gives you a default option, at this time it wanted to shrink the 240Gb HDD down to 30Gb for the NTFS and the rest for Linux. I manually alter this to 80Gb for the NTFS and the rest for Linux. There are a lot of other manual configuration options if you require, but I will not go into that to deep for now.
The complete install options are now shown again with the changes I have made. I agree and push the install button.
This take about 30 – 40 minutes, which is a similar wait and things to installing windows.
When complete the machine will reboot and on reboot I have a grub loader screen asking me which system I would like to use. I have openSUSE set as the default option.
I have kept it very simple as it is one of my first blogs, but there are plenty more options with multiple desktop options in Linux. But that is for another day.
ColinH
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