Linux - The Free Alternative to Windows

[Agent 47]

(From another topic...)

In a couple of months, I'm going to get a new case and motherboard with the new style SATA connections instead of the old style IDE connections, a CPU, and 2 gigabytes of RAM.

Then the following month I'll get two brand new SATA hard drives, a 160 gigabyte to install Windows, and a 1000 gigabyte, or terabyte hard drive, and then, the month after that I'll get two SATA DVD drives.


http://www.sportssuck.org/phpbb2/viewto ... e5f#p40064

Fat Man, or anyone really, when you're re-formatting, or starting out with a fresh hard drive like that, before you install Windows, have you ever considered making a small partition to set aside, to put a Linux operating system onto?

Linux OS's co-exist quite happily alongside Windows, and the best part is - THEY'RE FREE!

It's like having two separate computers on the one machine.

And it doesn't hurt to have a back-up operating system.

Especially a free one!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

[Agent 47]

You can get a Linux Distribution from either, one of those free software DVD's that come with computer magazines, or download one directly from one of the official Linux websites -


http://www.debian.org/

http://fedoraproject.org/

http://www.gentoo.org/

http://mandriva.com/

http://www.linuxmint.com/

http://www.pclinuxos.com/

http://www.puppylinux.org/

http://www.slackware.com/

http://www.slax.org/

http://www.opensuse.org/en/

http://www.ubuntu.com/


Either way, just save the .iso disk image to your computer, and burn it to a CD, and that gives you a bootable installation disk.

Some versions of Linux can even be installed onto Windows, just as you would install any other program onto Windows. So that saves messing around with partitioning your hard drive, if you don't want to do that.

Here is an example of a welcome screen that comes up when a Linux installation disk is run under Windows...

LinuxUbuntuWelcomeScreenMenu.jpg (60.39 KiB) Viewed 354 times