Thinkpads Forum

I have aquired a like new Thinkpad R40 2681 CU3 w/XP Home and had IBM to send me the restore CD's. Today I ordered SuSE 9.1 Personal Edition to give linux a try. I'm completely uneducated in linux so I will probably ask some questions here that I will regret asking later, so bear with me when I post!

What I would like to do is what some of the other guys/gals here have done and divide my HD into two 20 GB partitions leaving the IBM restore section out, leaving/putting XP on until I get SuSE working and am confortable using it. I have Partition Magic 8.0 and as I said, the IBM restore CD's plus an up to date McAfee virusscan CD. I'm fairly confortable using regedit for MS as long as someone takes me by the hand and explains every step of the way. I don't dig around in there just for the fun of it.

I think I understand how go about this process but I'd like a tutoral telling me exactly what to do, step by step without the "Oh yea, don't forget to..." type instructions. For my sake, please keep the steps in the order they should come in.

I hope I'll like linux so much that I'll delete XP off of my HD in the future. If there is such a tutoral already written somewhere concerning SuSE and the R40 2681, just post a link to it.

Thanks for any and all input.

Connor

Boy! I ask everyone to answer "step by step" and forget to give all the information myself! Crow never did taste very good.

What I wanted to add (and forgot) was that I'll be using a Kensington optical wireless mouse that uses a USB dongle for the receiver. Just can't get use to touch pads and mini joy sticks. Also, I'll be installing IBM's mini PCI wifi unit later using Linksys' wireless cable/hub/router unit. Would it be advisable to add this unit before installing SuSE so it will find everything the first shot? I worry about problems setting the wireless system up afterwards.

Hope I got it all this time.

Connor...

I have installed RedHat 6.1, 7.0, 7.3, 8.0, Gentoo 2004 (dud), SuSe 9.0. In the RedHat systems, I have Samba, Java, Ethereal, Nessus and NMap all running. In SuSe, I am still trying to get Samba running.

And I still am light years away from having enough skill to do what you want to do.

Further, I think you will find that, unless you are a technical nerd and heavy-duty programmer, that Linux will fail to live up to its billing. XP Pro is just easier by miles.

Consider using VMware in XP to load SuSe as a virtual machine. This will allow to build and rebuild without affecting your host system.

Just my opinion (and that is near worthless in the eyes of Linux folk). ... jdhurst

Hi Connor,

Hope you have fun with SuSE 9.1 on your new ThinkPad. I would suggest having a read through of my post here http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=78.

Also please note that the SuSE 9.1 install program can allegedly resize the NTFS partition containing XP but I have read reports that doing so leaves XP unable to boot. I would therefore suggest doing all resizing in XP using your copy of PartitionMagic.

The other wrinkle with 9.1 is that there are issues with USB and auto-mounting of devices. I would suggest that you remove all non-essential USB devices during installation and spend time configuring them once installation is complete.

Finally, I'm not in total agreement with Mr. Hurst, I find Linux to be more stable, more secure, and faster on my TP41 than XP. However there is a much steeper learning curve on Linux and you may well need to spend some time configuring some of your hardware to get everything working. To my mind that's part of the fun.

You have already got a good start point though, having selected a ThinkPad and SuSE.

Regards

dkpw

dkpw:

Thanks for your reply. I had already found your other post a few days ago and printed out a hard copy. It's laying here on my desk for help when I get started with the suse install. It was well written and I've gone over it several times. I also found a very good review of 9.1 by Jason Prince at DesktopOS.com. He reviews both the Personal and Professional edition. I'm going to us Partition Magic to divide my HD up while waiting for SUSE to arrive (hopefully tomorrow).

I really appreciate the replys on this forum and look forward to using an OS without Peeping Billy going through my laundry when he wants!

Regards...

Connor