[nflug] Installfest Info

[frank pirrone]

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phil borden wrote:
>I Have Heard Of Installfests Around The Country. Is There Going To Be One In Our Area ? 
>Am Dying To Take The Leap (Away From Micro$oft). I Am Not Technically
Educated Enough To Tackle
>partitioning The Hard Drive. I Have Tried It On An Older Computer With
No Luck. I Would Like To
>Install Debian On My Current Computer. I Run a 2140 Intel Dual-Core
250 GB SATA Hard Drive
>With 2GB DDR2 Ram,  Can I Keep The Vista , And Run Linux On The Machine
As Dual Boot ?
>Or Do I Shitcan The Microsoft O/S And Start Fresh ?  Thanks For Taking
The Time ,Phil

Phil,

The "better" modern distros include installers that do virtually ALL the
work.  They will recognize your hardware AND your Windows installation,
will offer to resize the current Widows partition to make room for the
Linux install and will preserve the existing OS in creating a dual-boot
configuration.

I'm sure you know Ubuntu is popular, and is Debian based; PCLinuxOS is a
very comfortable fit for someone coming from a Windows experience;
openSuSE is excellent, etc.

Visit distrowatch.com to see some indication of popularity.

I don't know about install fests, either historic or planned.  One quick
word on partitions for a desktop install:  Don't worry about any
complexity you may have heard, it's just not critical with a desktop
installation.

A root partition / where all the filesystems will be installed and a
swap partition will be created by default by all distro's installers,
and the only other consideration you might want to make is creating a
/home partition that would not be formatted on any subsequent installs.
 Same with a /usr/local.  Those would be places where YOU created and
saved work and installed extra applications, especially ones you
compiled from source - a process that's not nearly as difficult or
intimidating as it might seem at the beginning.  By not formatting those
partitions should you re-install or install a new distro you would have
at least a starting point of retaining and employing personal files.

Frank
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