>On Friday 12 November 2004 12:02 pm, Bob Axtell wrote:
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>>Any ideas on how/what we need to do? In this way, we can accumulate
>>links and notes from those very satisfied Linux gurus out there.
>>    
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>
>What you want to do is "gradually" convert versus going at it "cold turkey".
>To do this, you want to be able to make your computer dual-bootable so that
>you can easily switch from one os to another, then slowly ween yourself
>off-of one os and gradually switch over to the new one.
>
>What you DON'T want to do is drop everything off of your computer, install
>linux then find out you got yourself in a bind because you are still missing
>some "must have" windows applications.
>
>Expect this process to take months versus days.
>
>In my case, I've got a triple boot harddrive between os/2, win98 and linux,
>but my suggestion to anyone who has not used linux before is to simply get
>yourself a 2nd harddrive so that you have 2 harddrives on your machine.
>Your original harddrive, do nothing to it, it stays as win2k or xp
>Your 2nd harddrive, make 4 partitions on it, example 10g harddrive:
>If you have an older computer, you may want to put-off running linux. linux
>will run, but it would sort of like putting xp on a 100mhz computer....
>which means that it would run slow.
>I would say, a 200mhz computer is at the bottom end of tolerable if you
>decided to run the latest mandrake especially if you got ISA cards in it....
>A 300mhz+ machine with more than 128m of ram is way better.
>1)split as win32 vfat partition of say 1g so that youu can share files
>between windows and linux (linux is quite okay writing to vfat32... I don't
>know the status of writing to ntfs... it was a problem in the past, plus
>microsoft is going to hold the secrets of that filesystem as long as
>possible to keep out the linux guys ;-)
>2)next partition, make it your "/home", probably 2g+ is fine... most of the
>document stuff end up in your "/home"
>3)next partition is "/" for the rest of your drive... 6.75g, but leave a
>little bit for your /swap file.
>4)If you got lots of memory, you probably won't touch the swap file, however,
>leave 256k for it anyways.
>
>My suggestion is go with an easy to use "Desktop" freindly linux...
>http://www.mandrakesoft.com/
>I haven't used SuSE, but it is also a recommended linux.
>
>After you have setup linux on the computer and got dual booting working, then
>the next steps to conversion is to start choosing what you will start to use
>to ween yourself off windows.
>My recommendation, use the KDE desktop.
>convert your email and browser and internet to use the KDE equivalents.
>If you have trouble with KDE's browser "konqueror" you can always substitute
>Mozilla or opera, hoewver, for the techno crowd, konqueror does quite well.
>Setting up kmail is fairly straightforward too. this is rather dated now, but
>it does show how easy it is to setup...
>http://www.ehosting.ca/customerService/tutorials/KDEmail/KDEmail.php
>
>slowly... you'll start migrating more and more like spreadsheets and other
>whatnot.
>
>On the windows side, you'll also want to become more and more familiar with
>opensource apps so that migrating is easier and doesn't look so foreign when
>you run the linux os partition.
>to begin with, you start migrating to...
>-http://www.mozilla.org instead of internet explorer.
>-http://www.openoffice.org instead of using microsoft office.
>...and slowly start substituting open source programs for your current
>windows programs.
>If you slowly migrate, you'll eventually find yourself rarely running your
>windows partition.... you'll be down to a couple of must-haves, then a few,
>then one,...then none.
>
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>>I figure we have about 2 years before MS drops Win2K support, maybe
>>5 before WinXP is dropped (Win98 was dropped last year).
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>
>I believe Win98 support was reactivated another 5 years to keep the tail-end
>or home users from converting to linux (which is better than you can say for
>win2k or the business oriented versions of windows).
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