Linux on a Windows box

Penink

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My boss is thinking about tricking out her Dell with a Linux OS. I know nothing. Does anyone have any info, input, have a friend of a friend who's done it? Any feedback or advice greatly appreciated.
Txvm
 
Re: Linux on a Windows box

A replacement for Windows, a dual boot or a virtual machine?

Check the Dell site for driver information for the laptop model. Dell supports Ubuntu on a number of machines.
 
Re: Linux on a Windows box

From my experience, Fedora 7 or 8 are better suited for the Windows experienced user.

First you install Windows.

Download the Fedora 8 DVD install .iso image to your disk. Now I use Macintosh Disk Utility to properly burn an .iso image to a disk.
Not sure what Windows software to use but the documentation is out there for you to look up.

Insert the Fedora disk into the drive and reboot. You may have to change you BIOS settings to boot from the drive. Normally this is a default.

When you are asked how to partition and where to install the Fedora distribution choose the "use free space from drive checkbox"

that's a rough advice I know. You can find the proper documentation on Fedora's website.

Linux can give be very useful. Openoffice for example or Scribus the list go's on and on.

Good Luck,

Vincent Niehaus
 
Re: Linux on a Windows box

I personally prefer Fedora too, because if you ever want to make a switch to Red Hat, there are many similarities. Note that the latest Fedora is version 9, not 8. You might want to try the Live CD first. That is a single CD image that will boot the computer into Fedora without touching the hard drive or an existing Windows install ( or an Intel Mac OS X install ). Note that because of the one-CD limit, some large applications aren't included, such as OpenOffice. If you decide you want to install linux, you can push the Live CD environment to the hard drive, and then install any other applications not on the CD from the Internet. A DVD install disc is available for a more complete original install, however there is no difference between the two once installed on the hard drive.

A heads up on some Linux quirks.

Some people prefer Ubuntu because it includes non-free software, which Fedora does not. For example, since there are many patents on encoding and decoding MPEG-1 Layer 3 files ( MP3 ), software for that is not included in Fedora. Windows and OS X do include that because Microsoft and Apple pay money to license that technology, and then pass that licensing cost on to their customers. Since Fedora and other Linux distributions are distributed free of charge, there is no way to pay a license, so MP3 support ( and DVD playback support ) is not included in the distribution. Some Linux distributions have the attitude that software patents are poppycock, and include those patented technologies anyway. Sometimes the distribution is set up in a country that has laws that doesn't recognize software patents, and include technologies such as MP3 playback. Technically installing and using that software in the US is not legal.

That said, in a business environment, most people should be doing work not entertaining themselves, so Linux can be a very good fit without those capabilities. The biggest rub with Linux distribution licensing issues is that wireless networking hardware many times requires firmware to be loaded via the driver at boot time. That firmware is generally not freely distributed, so it can't be bundled with Linux. To get some types of wireless network hardware to work, you must download the firmware from the manufacturer's site and install it so Linux can load it properly. Not always an easy process. Red Hat and Fedora are constantly working with manufacturers to license firmware in a way that it can be bundled with Linux. If you use wired network connections, there is not problem, in fact I have had fewer problems with Linux networking than Windows networking.

Best of luck with your experiment. If your Linux tests seem slow or sluggish, add RAM. Desktop Linux loves RAM maybe more than Windows does.

Chasd.
 

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