Ethan Vos wrote:
Can I run this from a Win98 C: drive and install to a Linux D: or E: drive?The binary-1 CD has most of the commonly wanted software. The other CDs have additional software, but you can start out with the first one and get the other stuff as needed/desired (either by downloading and using the extra CDs, or better still, just directly downloading the various packages).The instructions seem a little daunting... Ethan Robert Sheets wrote:On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 17:19:59 -0400, Ethan Vos <ethan.vos@sympatico.ca> wrote:Good afternoon all. The mirrors that I have looked at have binary-1 through binary-7. Which is the correct one to use?
Concerning your second question (which was top-posted, a practice frowned upon on this list; instead, post your responses so anybody can come in six months later and start reading the post at the top and understand what's going on in the conversation):
Debian is a completely different animal than Windows; it requires its own partitions and/or drives. I assume by your question that you already have a D: and E: partition and/or drive. Yes, Linux can be installed on those partitions/drives, but they'll have to be repartitioned/reformatted, and they'll essentially become invisible to Windows. The names "D:" and "E:" will no longer apply; that's strictly a Microsoft invention.
Rather than running from the Win98 C: drive, you'll probably want to boot off the binary-1 CD, and install it from the CD to what you currently are calling D: and/or E: (wiping out any data on those partitions/drives in the process). Normally this won't affect your current Windows setup, but if you don't understand partitioning, you can make a mistake and wipe your Windows setup completely. So either make sure you know what you're doing, or make a backup of the entire Windows drive first (which is a good idea anyway).
If D: and E: are separate drives and not just separate partitions, you might feel more comfortable unplugging the data/power cable from the C: drive to make sure nothing happens to it during the install. The problem with that is that because of the way the boot-up process gets installed, your machine probably won't be able to boot into Debian after the install (I'm assuming that since you have Win98 you have an older machine that expects to boot off the first drive on IDE0), or if it does, you'll find you can't boot Windows after the install without some tweaking on the Debian side.
My suggestion to you is to make sure you understand the installation instructions, which seem a little daunting, or decided to do away with Win98 completely for now until you've had some experience with Debian, or to get your feet wet with a Knoppix CD (http://www.knoppix.org) instead of installing Debian to your machine. The Knoppix CD lets you boot off the CD into a fully-functioning Linux environment, and then when you exit out of Knoppix and remove the CD and reboot you're back in Win98 like Knoppix never existed. It's considerably slower than a real Linux installation (since everything's running off the CD), but it's a good way to introduce yourself to Linux.
-- Kent