Penguins are taking over...
2003-10-15 09:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbearAfter trying Xandros (the Linux distribution formerly known as Corel) in my office on Monday, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chaoswolf promptly insisted that I install it on her new laptop. Done.
It's based on Debian, giving it a huge collection of packages and a world-class package manager. Highly recommended, and even worth paying for (they don't have free downloads; if you're broke, get someone to help you with Debian if you haven't installed it before).
The laptop, a Fujitsu S-6000, is running WinXT Home, meaning that the usual Linux tools can't resize the XT partition. Fortunately it comes with a backup program (DriveImage? From the makers of Partition Magic) that backs up into a FAT32 partition and knows how to resize to make more room. So adding the necessary Linux and swap partitions was fairly simple:
chaoswolf promptly insisted that I install it on her new laptop. Done.It's based on Debian, giving it a huge collection of packages and a world-class package manager. Highly recommended, and even worth paying for (they don't have free downloads; if you're broke, get someone to help you with Debian if you haven't installed it before).
The laptop, a Fujitsu S-6000, is running WinXT Home, meaning that the usual Linux tools can't resize the XT partition. Fortunately it comes with a backup program (DriveImage? From the makers of Partition Magic) that backs up into a FAT32 partition and knows how to resize to make more room. So adding the necessary Linux and swap partitions was fairly simple:
- Do a backup. Ask for an extra 5GB of space in the backup partition.
- wait several hours while this process completes. By that time it's after midnight.
- come back the next evening. Although the Xandros documentation claims that the installer can resize FAT32 partitions, I find no evidence of this.
- reboot with the latest LNX-BBC and run GNU Parted to shrink the backup partition and make room.
- rerun the Xandros installer, telling it to "use free space". Make the swap partition a little bigger than the installer's choice.
- ask for a full install, and answer a few simple questions about timezone, networking, and passwords.
- push the button
- hit ENTER to reboot into a shiny new Xandros. Observe that it interacts just fine with the network. Check to see that it still boots Window$. Wonder why anyone would want to.
