Thanks for taking the time to type that response out. This is really good information and I’m glad everyone can now have access to it.

You’re right - I wasn’t all that sure what the term ‘free space’ was referring to, and that (amongst a cavalcade of other atrocities) gave me a hard time.

The Dell: I was surprised by those paritions because I thought the entire restore was on the restore CD. HOwever, you bring up a good point and if those CDs only point to the restore image on the mystery partition then that would explain it.

Again, thanks for sharing this info. I’m sure a lot of people will find it useful :)

Spent a little while listening to your 11.5 podcast. I think I might have a solution to (in part) some of your dual boot install problems. To do that we need to have a mutual understanding of what is meant by the term phrase ‘existing free space’ .

Lets say you have a 20G HD with w/98se installed and it use’es the entire drive, (just one big C) start to finish. Obviously, the entire drive has been formated FAT32 but when you bring it up in my computer and highlite c:/ and click properties, you see something like 3.5% used, 16.5% free.That free space is where you want to install Linux. You don’t have to resize, repartation or anything. I been able to install Mandrake Linux sense v. 8.0 to dual boot with windows with out a hiccup, simply by selecting use available free space on windows partation
and letting Drakex do the rest. When all is said and done and you reboot you will be presented
with a Linux Loader that will give you the option to select windows but will default to Mandrake.

As for why you new out of the box Dell desktop had multipule partations, is probably because you really didn’t get an offical windows installation disk. Probably what you have is a restore/
rescue type disk that works with one of them, (partations) to restore windows back to its original state. I bet if you were to wipe the entire drive clean, that restore/rescue disk you have would be useless.

HTH//Lance

Thanks for stopping by.

I have yet to find someone who doesn’t like Kanotix once they try it. It really is fast, isn’t it? I must admit I missed the Debian distros while I was off in FC world. It’s nice to be back.

The show name change is permanent. I like the idea of giving a nod to the pioneers of this thing, but I’m not as evangelical as RMS. I’m not all that worried about what other people call it, I’ve just decided to use GNU/Linux for myself.

All he really wanted out of me was the GNU/Linux thing (as you say, at least for his show) and for his show to be available in OGG format. Since I had already decided to start using the phrase GNU/Linux that was an easy one and since I also agree that OGG is a better way to go - that was an easy one too. All in all, it wasn’t too bad, but that’s only because I pretty much agreed with him on both points to begin with. I can imagine it would be harder if he wanted things that I didn’t necessarily agree with to being with.

GNU/Jon

:)

Pat from TLLTS

Hopefully we’ll see an RSS feed for the OGG files too, but I don’t want to ask too much :)