meshsmooth Posted March 26, 2004 Share Posted March 26, 2004 I have download and acquired mandrake and fedora what flavour do you recommend to a first time Linux user and which one will play best with Houdini. I have an 80gb NTFS drive with win XP on it that I am leaving alone and a 60GB drive ready for the Linux experience. What swap partition, Linux formatted partition and fat 32 partition sizes would you recommend? Is there a way to mount ntfs with full axcess or just read only? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheUsualAlex Posted March 26, 2004 Share Posted March 26, 2004 In the past, I've had partitions separated between NTFS and Linux format, with a FAT32 as the intermediary between the 2. Generally, I have about 2 or 3 GB for swap, about 10 or 12 GB for FAT32 (since I don't use this too much), and about 15 or so GB for root, with the rest for /Home partition. I find it safer to put the /home in a separate partition so that in an event that I might do something to mess up the system due to my lack of experience, I'd still have my personal stuff in tact. Linux can't read NTFS format since that's a proprietary format (?). And generally, you want to install Windows first before you install Linux. Otherwise, Windows will wipe the boot record and you can't boot to Linux without the boot disk. Windows don't play very nice, unfortunately. Oh, btw, you can't create the Linux partition out of the NTFS partition. So make sure you leave a separate partition untouched for Linux. BTW, I think there has been some hack version of getting Linux to read (not sure about write) the NTFS file format. I can't remember much of this any more as it was easier for me to just create a separate FAT32 partition just for the intemediaries. Also, it's quite easy to get Linux to mount onto Windows network (if I still remember how to do it... :/ ), but it's kind tricky to get Windows to find the Linux network. hoep that helped. Alex Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meshsmooth Posted March 30, 2004 Author Share Posted March 30, 2004 I went with fedora then switched to mandrake 10 and found it much more friendly. and it can mount NTFS read only without any extra work. now i just need to get houdini working. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MG Posted April 1, 2004 Share Posted April 1, 2004 Try to avoid NTFS at any cost, I'm running Win2K instead on fully FAT32 partionned drives. Works great, couldn't live without being able to interchange my files. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheDunadan Posted August 11, 2004 Share Posted August 11, 2004 NTFS is no problem for Linux anymore really, not hard to mount NTFS drives and most recent releases of the various distros come with inital support for this. Personally I like best Slackware & Gentoo and nowadays the installation of slackware is just a breeze and is really straight forward. Gentoo takes some extra time to install and I believe if you print out the installtion documentation it's like 100 pages, BUT the doc is great. When I started with Linux 2-3 years ago I went for redhat and had almost no clue on what is going on really, installing drivers was a nightmare, doing startup scripts as well etc: basically I googled all day for step by step instructions on the various stuff. This wasn't really enjoyable and even after those step by step instructions I didn't understand much about linux. However after following the Gentoo installation docs and doing a system from scratch I learned much: if you go for gentoo you compile most tools etc. directly from source code and you install all startup scripts, components etc. of your system (and in the doc they tell you all you need to know to do so). Yes, it takes likely somewhere around 3 days to do it all, but after you've done it, you know where to look if something causes problems, you know the most important linux commands and you know how to fix things etc. Besides the gentoo forums are among the best I know with many very competent users that help you if you should run into any problems. Jens Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hoknamahn Posted August 11, 2004 Share Posted August 11, 2004 Yeaaaaaaa... Gentoo is our choice! By the way now it's not a problem to mount NTFS in r/w mode. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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