Preston Boyington wrote: > I am looking at picking up this laptop for a friend of mine this > afternoon and will be installing Debian on it shortly thereafter (I > don't plan to boot this thing up into Vista at all). The debian-installer can shrink an existing partition. If you have enough disk space to throw away you could, not that I am suggesting doing this but just mentioning it academically, keep it around and install Debian on the rest of the disk. > Seeing as how this is a 64 bit machine I was wondering what > differences I will need to be aware of over the "normal" way I do > net-installs of Debian. There really isn't any difference. You would be hard pressed to tell that one system is different from the other one. The installation is all the same and so don't worry about it. (I always look to make sure that the components are supported.) Make sure that you have the amd64 install image and not one of the other ones named such that they sometimes pull people into choosing them but they are really for different architectures. However, if you are a user of closed source proprietary plugins for your web browser such as Flash and other such things then you might find that those 3rd party closed source binary blobs might not support your 64-bit system. There are solutions. I run my desktop in 64-bit mode but keep a 32-bit Debian chroot and run my browser in 32-bit mode from it. Everything else is 64-bit. When I 'apt-get dist-upgrade' I do so in both the outer 64-bit system and in the inner 64-bit chroot. Works very well. There are a number of good Debian documentation pages about them in the Debian reference manual. http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-tips.en.html#s-chroot > Does anyone have this machine and, if so, what snags did you run into? > > Here's a link to the machine I am picking up: > http://tinyurl.com/232sxo I know nothing about that particular machine. My comments were directly only at the 64-bit installation and desktop question. Bob
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