Geek night out

[janestarz]

The Ubuntu install party was a success! Gerben did a presentation on what Ubuntu is, pointing out the differences between open and closed source (with a lovely apple pie metaphore) and showed us all sorts of tricks.

I had a whack at Kubuntu and so far it looks good, so I'll have a go at installing it on the laptop. Best tip I've picked up last night? Three partitions (four if you want a dual-boot)

• one root, for your Ubuntu OS, this will be called /
  This should be around 6 gigabyte for the latest Ubuntu, iirc.
  
• one swap. This can be small as Linux doesn't use a lot of memory for the programs. It doesn't even come close to Viesta.
  
• one home directory for all your data. This will be called /home/
  All users have their own /home/username folder (comparable to My Documents) and this data can be left unformatted when you're next installing linux. Because only root (/) will be affected, your data will be safe!

Try a live cd today to see if linux is something for you!

Best quote of the night?
Gerben: "There were a lot of normal people here tonight."

Comments

[janestarz.livejournal.com]

Perhaps. I now have my first Linux install under the toolbelt, but I doubt I know enough to hardwire a headstrong system.
Besides, I have made other Plans.

Each to his own, Oz, but when I finally logged into my XP again to play my semi-annual game, I spent three nights updating the system and waiting for the virus scan to finish. I like my *nix :-)
Plus, my geek friends told me what the usr/bin/girl is used for :-)

[elektron.livejournal.com]

There's a /usr/bin/girl?

Normally you want separate /boot, /var, /tmp, /usr as well, although getting the sizes right is a bit tricky, so sodium just has / and /boot (ick!).

Swap is a tricky beast, but less-than-double is a good rule of thumb (and then you install more RAM and things become tricky again). On the work server I set up, I left gaps between partitions the first time I did resizing to make any future resizing easier.

(And I may not use Linux as my primary OS, but a Knoppix livecd is useful to keep around.)