Newbie Learning Linux

Good afternoon everyone,

I have got a retail copy of SuSE 8.1 Pro and am planning to dual boot it off the puter i am useing right now. The 2 manuals it came with are about 900 pages long total and I can see I am in for quite a challenge here. Before I start installing the OS I would like to Throw my Sys Info out to everyone, and hopefully I can be warned ahead of time of any hardware bugs, or basic hang ups I can expect while trying to intergrate linux into my computer. As an example of what im looking for, my friend tried to install 8.1 on his computer and could not get the GUI to work, because of his gefore2 card. I don't know the specifics of his problems, but things like that I would like to avoid in my installation. If not avoid then to atleast have a plan in place to tackle the problem when it arises.

Here are the specs
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1.1 Gig Athlon 256 Ram
4200 Ti Geforce 4 128Ram
Asus A7v333 With on board sound
Sound blaster Live Value Sound card
Generic Network card
Generic DVD Rom Drive
HP 9300 Series CD writer
Running WinXP Home On drive C
Drive D = untouched 40gig HD

I have googled for linux info, and am sorry to say that most of it I dont understand at this time, :confused: All i need right now is just help in makeing sure that I get a clean install on the computer so I have a baseline to start learning Linux on.

Thanx

SuSE was a good choice if you are just starting out. I can not foresee too many problems installing this version of linux. The setup is pretty straight foward. My advice would be to plan your partitioning out well. If this is to be single boot, a nice size home opt and root directory is always a pluss, especially if you are going to install just about everything. Im not sure how much you know about hard disks but i have found this setup works nicely. One primary for your root partition, followed by an extended, too the amount you would like to use for the rest of the partitions. And the proceed in creating logical partitions such as opt and home. Also A nice sized swap is always good, around 300Mb. As for the vga setup, SuSE has a nice test button there to make sure everything works properly. If your specific card does not work under their exact driver, I have found the Vesa setting works with just about everything. Hope this helps a little.

hehehe, I have got it installed right now and am typeing this message through konqueror web browser... Im so happy. I do have a newbie question though, my desktop is set to 600/800 and i want to bump the resolution up a notch... how do u chane the rez?

i got the dummies version of linux redhat 8.0. but i F'ed up my HDD when i went to partition it. so when i installed red hat i really wasnt impressed =[ since my video games cannot play on it. i went crawling back to windows ;)

I am quite happy with my copy of suse, but I am also finding out that There are next to 0 games ported to linux yet... I guess thats the problem with an Open OS. Im still pretty sure that from now on every box I own will be dual booting Linux and [blur]Windoze[/blur]

lol You worried about porting games to linux already and I have had my dual boot (RH/XP) for like 2 weeks now and am still having trouble installing software! Actually all in all I am pretty happy. Takes a while to find some good documentation geared towards someone who is fairly new to linux but once you find a good sources then its just a matter of checking it out. Although I still find myself getting pissed at RH for not being bi-lingual and understanding my DOS commands!!!

hjack

Check out wine as it can run a good number of games. Besides that the best advice I can give you is look up your local LUG they will be a great resource for learning Linux