Linux and don't you forget it
Things I don't want to forget about installing Linux:
By far the easiest thing is to install another hard drive and isolate operating systems as far as possible.
Since most of the machines I work on are laptops, that's not always practical. Plainly one key is to install a second OS on a new computer --- which I got to do this year. Advice from U Chicago (below): install the older OS first. This makes sense.
Advice for a machine sharing Windows and Linux: Make a partition that can be read by both. Current suggestions re partitioning:
For Windows, use NTFS and for Linux, use ext3. Reason: these filesystems allow journaling, which facilitates recovery from harsh shutdowns. For the shared partition, use FAT32 or FAT16. This is an older filesystem that can be read by both Linux and Windows.
Website of Stan Finley gives advice on reading NTFS from Linux; haven't tried it. Also haven't tried the partitioning methods suggested by thefreecountry.com. What I did (not by design) was hose the whole laptop, reinstall Windows (setting NTFS and FAT partitions there), then install Linux (doing manual partitioning of the remainder of the disk with Disk Druid).
For Linux, at least two partitions --- one for swap, twice the size of system memory; and the other for / (root). Option --- small partition for /boot. Many other options.
On the laptop I'm currently using, every Linux install looked awful because the screens were flashing or just plain out of whack in X. What fixed this was a fresh install in which, when the FC3 first asked what to do, rather than default Enter, I said "linux resolution=1024x768". An upgrade install in which some of old config files were retained did not resolve my screen problems.
IDE to use: I like Anjuta.
posted
at 3:30 PM
2 Comments:
Oh,how interesting! I didnt know that one computer can share 2 Operating System. But what's the point of installing Linux OS while you've already have Windows, beside the fact that you can mess around and pracise for CSC 100? ^_^
Your Student
11:27 AM
This is a good question, since it seems that one can do everything one wants to do in an MS Windows environment; even dinosaurs who remember the times before the dominance of Windows can see that hegemony has its benefits.
1. As it is good to know different languages for different programming tasks, it is good to know different operating systems for different systems tasks. We gain flexibility.
If you can learn two, you can learn three! Maybe you'll want to program in some completely different environment someday.
2. Unix-like systems allow the sysadmin to work "closer to the metal," that is, with more direct control of the machine --- or machines, in a networked environment. (The GUI imposes a substantial barrier. This is true for all GUIs --- X, Windows, Mac.)
Control is power. Suppose you have a big experiment to run that requires cutting your work into a lot of pieces and then putting it back together again --- this is the case with my summer job. It's a lot easier to do on Linux.
3. I think that one learns more about operating systems generally working on a Linux machine than on a Windows machine. (One can insulate oneself from that learning, though, especially with Gnome, KDE, etc.)
4. There are a lot of Unix and Linux systems out there! We would be limited in our professional opportunities if we didn't know anything about them.
It may seem that we're making the effort for style points rather than out of necessity. But there are times when applying more effort and know-how at the programming end will make a difference in execution efficiency that allows us to get the job done. (My summer job gives an example of this, too.) The more we know, the better our judgment will be.
Unfortunately, it is not possible (so far as I know) to have two operating systems loaded at the same time in our desktop or laptop machines, hot-swapping between them. We can have one loaded and emulate another, as we do with Windows/Cygwin or Linux/Wine --- and the emulation works, more or less, but is inherently less efficient. A large system with multiple virtual machines could presumably have different OSes on them. See the example of the IBM server with hundreds of Linux virtual machines mentioned elsewhere in the web log.
3:05 PM
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