«

[The Fifth Horseman]

Allright, I guess I was dumb to use NTFS in the first place anyway... as my recent trouble prove, it's a pain in the backside if your OS totally crashes and you don't have another NTFS-compatibile OS at hand to extract your stuff from the drive.

I'll just get another HDD for file juggling and then reformat each drive in sequence to FAT-32. Should do it anyway.

[guesst]

My linux buddy seems to favor Debian at the moment. Long time between "official" released, but he brags that the "unstable" version is actually spot on at any given moment. Plus he loves the Multi-media functionality of it.

[Don Andy]

It's not like I could really tell which Linux distro is the best, since I only tried Ubuntu, yet, but I think it's a pretty easy one, as long as you don't try to fiddle to much in the advanced settings without exactly knowing what you do. I had it for a month now on my Notebook and it became pretty much useless.

It also has this very handy application wizard, that lets you download packages and install them without having to work through lines of code in the console

So I'd recommened you Ubuntu/Kubuntu although I can't say if any other distro might be better.

[crossover]

The wizard you're referring to is Synaptic, which can be found in other distros as well. But yeah, you're right, Linux is getting more and more user friendly with every release. As I've already said, Ubuntu is a good way to start. Plus, they ship free CDs too Check out www.ubuntulinux.com if you haven't yet.

[Mara]

yup writing NTFS with linux -> bad

Avoiding writing on non-linux (NTFS or Fat32) partition using linux is a good idea.
if you want to dual boot with windows, creating a fat32 partition to share the files works fine.

I'm all on ntfs, quitte of an annoyance.

For the distrib I would say Mandriva ou Kumbuntu/Ubuntu

If you never touched linux, Mandriva might be a better idea, but Kubuntu is still easy to use.

[BeefontheBone]

Originally posted by guesst@May 5 2006, 10:08 PM
My linux buddy seems to favor Debian at the moment. Long time between "official" released, but he brags that the "unstable" version is actually spot on at any given moment. Plus he loves the Multi-media functionality of it.

I've found that; Debian is nice, and the installation procedure was comprehensible but gave lots of options for customisation, which is always nice.

As for GUIs, I'll be going for Fluxbox when I get round to installing Linux on this PC (and getting some drive rails for the other drive...) because I like the stripped-downness. Either Gnome or KDE will be fine for anyone who's used to Windows or OSX - each can be set up to behave like any OS you're used to when you first run them.

You don't necessarily need a drive dedicated to your chosen distro, but it's a lot harder to accidentally erase stuff you meant to keep that way (though I'm sure you're capable of partitioning a drive ). If you want to share files between dual-booting OSs, you'll need a FAT32 partition or drive available.

[Bp103]

I use KANOTIX its installable and a live cd and can do all what you wanted :w00t:

http://kanotix.com/Downloads.html

And you can still boot windows

[Ioncannon]

hmm, ubuntu can't read NTFS can it? Also, you don't need kbuntu. You can unpack KDEbase from the add/remove applications program. Then at the login screen, choose which GUI to use.

[plix]

Originally posted by Ioncannon@May 13 2006, 10:39 PM
hmm, ubuntu can't read NTFS can it?

I'm not a Ubuntu user, so the following is slight conjecture (but keep in mind that this applys regardless to anyone experienced enough to compile their own kernel). Don't hold me to it.

NTFS support really started getting somewhere in the 2.4 series (kernel, that is) and has really taken a leap forward in the 2.6 tree. The MFT format is understood well enough that read support has been stable for at least a couple of years now. However, due to some really odd -- and obviously undocumented -- ways that Windows handles file creation and resizing, write support is ridiculously dangerous. Write support is coming along, and there's a FUSE (think microkernel-esq user-space drivers) driver which has better write support but is still pretty spotty.

In summary, read-only mounting: usable and stable; read/write mounting: dangerous though half-supported.

This is all kernel-level stuff (don't get pedantic about the FUSE driver) and as such a Ubuntu user would be wise to check for available packages for the NTFS driver (and I'd be surprised if none of the shipped default kernels supported it).

Also, and highly unrecommended: there exists a tool somewhere (the name of which slips my mind) which allows you to use the Windows NTFS driver with Linux-the-kernel. It pretty much requires you're running on a dualboot machine with a valid Windows installation, though (but then again, if you weren't, what would be the point?).

[crossover]

Originally posted by Ioncannon@May 14 2006, 03:39 AM
hmm, ubuntu can't read NTFS can it? Also, you don't need kbuntu. You can unpack KDEbase from the add/remove applications program. Then at the login screen, choose which GUI to use.

Hmm, the last time I booted up my Ubuntu it read NTFS partitions just fine, if I recall correctly :whistle: