[PLUG] It's Here!!

[Aaron Burt]

On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 09:48:13AM -0700, John Jordan wrote:
> OK, FedEx Tracking says it's on the truck for delivery today. Yay!! 

Indeed.

> I read about Ext<x>, Reiser<x> and a couple other possibilities, but
> I didn't really understand the differences. If this were your
> laptop, which would you choose?

Ext3.  I'm conservative with these things, and I think the advantages
of the other filesystems won't matter on a laptop.

> 2) Does my plan of 15 Gb for Windows, 15 Gb for Suse 9.3, and 50 
> Gb for data sound sensible?

Sure.  And have a separate swap partition at least 2x your RAM size so
it'll be easier to suspend-to-disk, even if you upgrade the RAM later.

> 3) A related question, do I really have to boot XP first? I had 
> planned never to boot it if possible. But the Suse 9.3 book says I 
> must boot to Windows in order to run Scandisk and Defrag to move 
> the files to the front of the drive, and also to disable the swap file. 
> Otherwise the NTFS partition cannot be resized. Is this true? Do I 
> have any other options?

Since you're getting the system with a fresh install, you don't have
to boot XP.  Typically, it comes with the XP installer in a FAT32
partition, and the first time you boot it up, it runs an install and
converts the partition to NTFS.  

FAT32 is much easier to shrink down and rearrange than NTFS, so don't
let it do the install/conversion.  Just use GNU partedit or something
to shrink down the partition, save the boot sector to a file somewhere
(dd if=/dev/hda of=bootsect.win bs=512 count=1) and install GRUB.

> 4) I know that in XP the user can disable the touchpad. I plan never 
> to use it. I have purchased instead a Logitech USB optical scroll 
> mouse to use with the new laptop. Can I disable the touchpad later 
> after I have Linux installed? Or should this be done during 
> installation?

I dunno.  I wouldn't worry about it, especially since you might forget
or lose the mouse later and find yourself using the touchpad anyway.

Enjoy the new toy,
  Aaron