Tips on moving to Linux?

[Ral-Clan]

Within the "Something Else" installation option, here is what you want to do:
1) Select the current Windows partition (/dev/sda1).
2) Click "Change..."
3) You will need to shrink your Windows partition to make room for a Linux partition. Enter a new size for your Windows partition. Based on how much space you've used (almost 30 GB), you could safely shrink it down to 60 GB (60000 MB) and have plenty of room to spare.
4) After the /dev/sda1 partition has been shrunk, you will now see a new option in the list: "free space". Select this option, then click the plus icon to add a new partition in the free space, and give it the following options:
  Type: Primary
  New partition size: just accept whatever's here (it will be all your available free space)
  Use as: Ext4 journaling file system
  Mount point: / (you can select it from the drop-down menu)

Then click OK. Your new partition will show up as "/dev/sda2" alongside your Windows partition on "/dev/sda1", and you can proceed to "Install Now".

Good luck

This is the most helpful reply so far.  Thanks.  But what does...

Mount point: / (you can select it from the drop-down menu)

....mean?  I can select what, exactly, from the drop down menu?  I have no idea what a "mount point" is, so I'm not going to know what to choose.

Thanks.

[Ral-Clan]

Ral-clan, I feel like you've had a lot of info thrown at you, much of it conflicting. I wanted to just summarize a few things for you based on my years of using Linux as my primary OS.

Thanks, Mr. Bumpy.  That was a very informative and plain-spoken posting.  I definitely came out of it knowing more about Linux.

[Ral-Clan]

What he means is this. Mount point simply means what you want the partition to do. In linux you can have multiple partitions all doing their own job but still be part of the the whole system. So you can have one simply for /home which is where you store all your personal stuff.

CriteAnime, thanks so much.  I understand I need to first shrink my Windows XP partition with gparted and then create a partition for Linux.  But what I don't quite get is: do I have to create three separate partitions?  One for "root", one for "/home" and one for "swap"?

If I just shrink the XP partition with gparted and leave the rest of the disk "blank" (free - no defined partition), can't the Lubuntu installer handle that automatically?

I'm really not sure how to properly create the three root/home/swap partitions for my Lubuntu installation - or even if I need to.  And if I do, how will the Lubuntu installer know how to use the three partitions I create?

I also noticed your Linux partition seems to be "logical" rather than "primary".  Why did you choose this, and what should I choose?  That's confusing for me.

[Ral-Clan]

Hi Guys!

Thanks for all the help understanding Linux partitions.  Although I could have gone this way (and the info will be useful in the future), I instead did the simplest thing and just disconnected the 500GB "media" drive from my system while installing Lubuntu.

The Lubuntu installer then proceeded normally, allowing me to partition my 160GB "OS" hard drive.  So now I have a dual-boot Windows XP / Lubuntu system!  Yay!

I'm posting this from the Lubuntu OS right now.

So, now that I've gotten this far, the first thing I want to do is do a backup before I start trying to install custom drivers for my hardware and screw things up. But, I've never backed up a dual OS system before.  I am going to need some advice on the best backup strategy.

When I only had Windows XP - I used Nero Backitup to make an image of my entire C: drive to an external USB drive. Now that I have two OS partitions to backup, I'm not sure if Nero will be able to handle the Linux OS partition (as Nero runs within Windows).

Is there anything people really like?  Should I just image the whole 160GB drive in one bit image, or backup/image the each OS partitions separately?  If separately, is there a way to do this that will preserve the GRUB/MBR early boot utility or whatever (I don't really understand it yet).

Is there anything that will run from a live CD and backup to an external USB drive?

Thanks.

[Ral-Clan]

another great piece of backup software is Mondo Rescue.  I back up entire servers and my laptop to make a bootable set of dvds to restore from.

Good because Clonezilla fails for some reason, despite the fact that I'm following all online tutorials to a "T".

[Ral-Clan]

Where does it fail? Are you backing up to an external hard drive? Are you using the i386 or amd64 version of the Clonezilla liveCD? I've had problems before with the amd64 version on my laptop. Otherwise, the i386 version works perfectly on both of my systems.

Hi,

It fails somewhere after reading the first Windows XP partition....says something about partclone failing.  Tried running it twice.  Followed online tutorials to do this.

It's a x86 version.  Backing up to an external hard drive.  I thought it *might* be an issue with the external drive having not enough space, but I had zip compression turned on, so it shouldn't have been a problem.  I'm backing up a 160GB hard drive to an external USB 160GB hard drive with about 90MB free.  But the source 160GB hard drive containing my OSes is only really filled up about 30% (about 56GB of data)....so it should all fit.

[Ral-Clan]

The only thing I can think of is perhaps you need to run a chkdsk on the NTFS drive. Have you booted into Windows since resizing the partition? It will usually run chkdsk automatically when booting when it discovers the partition size has changed.

Yeah, I ran a chkdsk before re-partitioning, and once I partitioned, I booted in Windows XP and it automatically ran a chkdsk.  I've booted into Windows several times since (and before trying to back up with CloneZilla).

Since Clonezilla didn't work, I tried my old backup software, Nero Backitup Essentials (a basic OEM version that came with my DVD-writer and runs in windows or from a bootable recovery CD).  It's always worked well when backing up my Windows XP partition.

It also seems to recognize the file system on the linux partition (it shows a graphic diagram of the disk structure and identifies the Windows partion as NTFS, the Linux partition as ext3 or something (I can't remember)).  It also identifies another undesignated 3GB partition on the disk (not sure what that is).

I've used it now to backup both the Windows XP and Linux partitions individually, and then the whole drive (imaging the drive).

Before backing Linux partition it does warn that since the partition doesn't have a Drive Letter, it can't lock the partition during backup. However it will still proceed and does successfully verify the backup image file against the real partition.

As I said, I've also used it to "image" the whole 160GB drive (Windows XP / Linux / undesignated partitions) all together.  Since Nero Backitup is a Windows program, and I'm booting from the Windows XP partition, it warns again that it won't be able to lock the Windows partition as it is in use.  But again, it backs up the whole drive.  I know in the past when I've had to restore my Windows XP setup from these backups it has worked fine.

Nero Backitup Essentials is pretty easy to use and even allows the making of a bootable live restore CD (which I've done and had to use in the past).

So I hope I'm covered.

[Ral-Clan]

Hey ral-clan,

I know this was previously mentioned, but one of the UNIX ways of backing up drives is to use Disk Dump or dd.

Thanks, Teamblackfox.  That was informative.  I've got a lot to learn, but Linux is obviously very powerful once you've mastered the terminal.

[Ral-Clan]

Notice I say the word “had”. I just could not leave well enough alone. I thought hey lets install a Linux nVidia driver which screwed it all up. I got stuck in an endless loop of low graphics mode message. I could not even click on or tab to the OK button. I tried the Ubuntu recovery mode and steps I read to fix the issue but it didn’t work. To sum it up I had to delete the partition and use the Win install disk/Recovery console to fix the MBR. Then use a third party partition software to reclaim and stitch the lost partition back to the second partition. Whew! Lesson learned! Leave it be! Ubuntu works just fine without me mucking it up. I will try re-installing it tomorrow.

AmigaPixel, I did the exact same thing as you.  Tried to install an NVIDIA driver and it resulted in a black screen on boot.  I was almost ready to delete my Linux partition and reinstall when I finally found a good tutorial which helped me remove the bad NVIDIA driver using recovery mode.  I then installed the NVIDIA driver manually using the command line and the driver from the NVIDIA site and it worked!

The driver installed from the Linux GUI (software & updates) was the one that screwed up my system.  PM me if you need help.

[Ral-Clan]

Have you installed Chrome? If you go to the Chrome download page it should automatically give you the option to download the 32 or 64 bit version for debian systems. Click download and it should download the .deb file. Simply open it and the package manager will install it.

Can I ask you about .deb files?  I understand they are some sort of archive file containing installation files.

When I've seen the option to download .deb files on a website, it gives me all sorts of "flavours" for the deb files, with cute names like "saucy", "quanta", "precise", "onieric"...etc. But I don't know which "cute name version" I should choose for Lubuntu.

Here is an example download site:
https://launchpad.net/~mmbossoni-gmail/+archive/emu

The other question I have is: it seems that most software downloaded for Linux is from online repositories, or installed via the command line and live downloaded from the publisher's site as it's installing (live).  One thing I liked about windows is you could download the whole executable installer and keep it in your own archive in case you needed to re-install that particular version in future.  

For instance, I could make up a CD-R disc of old Windows 98 installers for applications I really liked, and then if I was setting up an old Windows 98 machine, I could just install all the old apps directly from the disc (using the old installers).  Some of these installers are hard to find on the web today, as the the software publishers have faded into obscurity.  Also, it meant the computer didn't have to be connected to the web.

Is there any way to do this with Linux?

[Ral-Clan]

AmigaPixel,

I am running Lubuntu 13.10, which has Ubuntu saucy at the core.  It dual boots well with Windows XP.  I ran the automatic updates too.  Gimp is installed, but I haven't installed any antivirus software yet.

Not sure if I should install AVAST for Linux, AVG for Linux or COMODO for Linux.  They all sound good.

[Ral-Clan]

Does linux Ubuntu have the eqivalent to Task manger? Applcations mainly Firefox freeze up and I have no way to end the programs. Ubuntu even with the updates seems a little buggy rigth now, I am using version 12.04 for now.

This exact thing happened to me yesterday for the first time.  Firefox totally froze and locked my Lubuntu system, requiring a hard reboot.  Is that what happened to you?

I can't figure out how to update Firefox.  In windows it was from the "About Firefox" window within Firefox.  This is not present in Linux firefox (at least in Lubuntu).  I suspect it must be done from the main system updates panel for Lubuntu.