Install RH On my Laptop

[John CLARK_5]

Dear friends,

I want to install my Linux Redhat on my Laptop, i have one HDD not partitionned.
I have a question, it seems stupid,should i make a partition and not format it, boot with RH first CD and install it ?
How much space disk it needs to install it ?

Ps : I have Linux RH 2.1

Thank's a lot.
Best regards.

[John CLARK_5]

I forgot to tell you that i want to keep my Windows XP in my laptop.

[Gopi Sekar]

If you can partition your windows xp and create some free partition then you can boot with RH CD and RH should be able to detect it and allow you to partition and install on it.

You can use Partition Magic to partition the system.

Hope this helps,
Gopi

[John CLARK_5]

Thank you for your replay.
Please, what kind of partition should i make with partition magic?

Best regards.

[Ivan Ferreira]

You should install Windows first, this will make you easy dual booting, because the redhat installation will add the windows boot option to the boot loader.

The space needed depends of the things you want to install. A full installation may take up to 6 GB. If you will install desktop options only (one desktop manager only), 3 to 4 GB should be enough.

[Gopi Sekar]

create atleast two partitions of type linux.

one for swap and one for all others. you can create more than two also.

Hope this helps,
Gopi

[Ross Minkov]

John,

First on a laptop you might be better off installing Fedora Core 4 instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1. You can download it for free from http://fedora.redhat.com/download/

If you want a Debian like distro you can use Ubuntu -- go to http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ and click on Shipit -- they will ship to you CDs for free.

I would create:

/boot - 100MB
swap - 2 x physical memory
/ - depends on what software you want to install; I think FC4 needs ~7GB for a full install; Ubuntu will need less space.

Regards,
Ross

[John CLARK_5]

Hi,

will i create these partition with manually with linux when i try to install it or with partition magic?

Thank's a lot.
Regards.

[Gopi Sekar]

you can create these partition during linux installation.

so all you have to worry about is creating one single big free partition from windows through Partition Magic.

After that boot through linux CD and linux will detect it as unformatted or unknown type of partition which you can split to have partitions of your choice.

Hope this helps,
Gopi

[iamthestar]

I prefer atleast 2GB space partition for RedHat.

while partitioning leave 2gb space as blank, while you install rh it will ask you for the type of partition you wish to create, ie ext2 or ext3 dont worry about it, but make sure you dont chose delete all partitions at the time of installation, choose leave partition unchange.

[Andrew Bruce]

My Recommendation:

Repartition your disk into three parts:

1. WinXP Partition (Normally NTFS format)
2. Xfer partition (FAT32)
3. Empty disk space

Point 1. is obvious! ;-)

Point 2. Linux does *not* have *useable* write support for NTFS partitions, ergo, you will not be able to write data into your NTFS partition. If you create a FAT32 partition, you can use it to store data that you may want to use (and edit) from either OS. This is what I have done, and, effectively, I use it for 'My Documents'.

Point 3. The Linux install will take care of the partition layout here, so you don't need to tell Windows how you want to use it.

Incidentally, Redhat/Fedora does not support NTFS mounting (read only) out of the box. You have to manually compile NTFS support as a post-installation step. A bit of a pain, but very useful to do!

As others have commented, Fedora Core 4 would be more appropriate than Redhat for a laptop.

Good luck.

Andy