Thinkpads Forum

Hi forum,

a warm hello as a new member, and my thanks to all upfront. As someone who hasn't installed linux in a long time, I'm looking for some advice. There are some constraints and some questions that I have, and any help, pointers and links would be greatly appreciated. I have tried searching the forums already but could not find the specific answers so far. I'm familiar at a user level with linux, but have not installed in years.

Constraints-
1. Need to retain the XP installation ( and all the installed programs ) already existing on my T43.

2. Lenovo/ IBM had not supplied me with an XP pro CD, but only the Rescue-n-recovery ( if I remember correctly ) option to do a clean stall again. Even after the linux installation, I need to retain this option, ie, be able to do a fresh install of XP.

Distro choice-
3. Would like to have as many features of the T43 working as possible with the installed distro- at the minimum, wired networking should be easily set up to work with my Huawei SmartAX MT841 modem.

4. Would like a distro with the best power ( read battery longevity ) management features for thinkpad laptops.

Other-
5. I'm not familiar with virtualization/ micro kernel tools either- do the readers recommend something along this route?

So, again thanks for recommending a distro, and outlining the steps for installing linux while retaining the XP option. Btw, isn't there a how-to-guide / sticky for doing this on thinkpads? I promise to write one and share my experience if I have the stomach to carry out the installation

-druid659

There are a variety of ways to do this. The way I do it is to install VMware and then build virtual machines of my choice. Right now I use Ubuntu Linux, although I still have RedHat and SuSE machines lying around somewhere. Running linux as a guest in VMware will accomplish the goals you set out for yourself.

As I noted, there are other ways as well. ... JDH

I'm in the separate partition camp rather than VM. The advantage of installing in a separate partition is that all the TP's resources are available to you rather than having to be shared as VM.

I would suggest using Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 i386 Alternate version. This will install more easily than the the regular Live CD version.

On the other hand I think many people here have successfully used the Live CD version. My personal choice is always Alt.

Partitions. You'll need a very minimum of around 5Gb and preferably around 10Gb for the root directory, a swap of not more than 500Mb (supposed to be 2 x memory, but in reality this should work fine).
I would also suggest a third one as your Home partition, using as much as you can spare.

Make sure you defrag XP using something like Raxco Perfect Disc which does a very tight defrag.

Welcome to the forums and let us know how you get on.

Thanks, JDH and poshgeordie. I'm still looking up terms used by you guys, on wikipedia and elsewhere. 'Alternate desktop CD' was one of these that had me stumped till i looked up! For rank newbies like me, apparently, its a text based installer that might have better hardware support, and more customizability. Curiously, its iso image is 699 MB in size, 5 more than the standard live CD with graphical installer.

I'm still looking up a few things related to both your posts- in the meantime posting a link here that others might find useful-
'Illustrated Dual Boot Site'
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/
Among other things it has a detailed guide for installing Ubuntu 8.04 alongside XP using the alternate CD.

Will come back soon with more questions.

cheers,
druid659

Hello.

Depending on what you are using XP for there are advantages to either the virtualization or standalone install routes. I use VirtualBox for virtualization and it works excellent although having a standalone install may be required for applications that require more direct access to hardware. There's no harm in running both a standalone install and a virtualized install under Linux.

If you want to dual-boot with your existing XP install you'll want to start by resizing the NTFS partition that XP is on down to something reasonable using something like `ntfsresize'. You can use a Live distro CD like SystemRescueCD to do this as it has a copy of the `ntfsresize' application on it. See http://franktank.com/blog/windows-serve ... fs-resize/.

Once you've shrunk your NTFS partition the system should still boot to Windows correctly and you'll have a bunch of unpartitioned space at the end of the disk. For distros: Ubuntu is popular, Debian testing (Lenny) or unstable (sid) is my choice, or SimplyMEPIS which has received good reviews. There are tons of great alternatives and you could even go the BSD route instead of Linux if you want to try something new. See http://distrowatch.com/ if you haven't already.

Your Linux distro should give you the choice to install on the free space and should install the grub boot loader post-install which will let you boot into Windows or Linux. Have fun!