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New Laptop

colintivy
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Posts: 1,375
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Registered: ‎07-03-2008

Re: New Laptop

Hi lads,,
A nasty bit of ill-health has kept me away from the keyboard but I should be able to dive into installing Mint11 soon. I have the live discs for 32 and 64 bit versions. Is there any value in going to one or the other?  I shall be using the built-in GParted to create the extended partition which will have the three ext3 (4?) ones in place and a small one formatted to FAT32 for the HP Guph. I believe that GParted will do all that for me OK.?
I have noted some disquiet about Mint 12, if I soldier on with Mint 11 do I have to convert to 12 before considering a future 13?
Undecided
VileReynard
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Registered: ‎01-09-2007

Re: New Laptop

I converted from Ubuntu to Mint 12 - which required a major re-install anyway.
The configuration of Mint 12 (when it came out) was very trial and error.
I think Mint always goes down the re-install route, instead of an upgrade.
I'd suggest Mint 11 would be easier - it seems likely that 13 will be less messy than 12.
Strictly speaking, if you have less than 4GB of main memory, then 32 bit is sufficient; but since you can run 32 bit programs on a 64 bit system why not go for 64 bit?
I did - and I have "only" 2GB of memory.
As an illustration of what is possible - but not recommended, see below.  Smiley

"In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Aardvark."

HairyMcbiker
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Registered: ‎16-02-2009

Re: New Laptop

I'm still on M11 (64bit) and can't see me moving to M12 at all. M13 possibly with Cinnamon more developed.
See my pic for my current setup of 4 (FOUR) active Linux systems (M11/M12/Pinguy/LMDE) , but only really using M11 I may delete the rest as I don't use them but was testing them to see if I preferred any over my current setup.
Mint prefers a clean install (of the / partition you can keep the /home). I have tried insitu upgrades and it was messy and SLOW, faster to copy a few files from wherever and edit them back after an install.
Gparted will do all of your partitioning needs.
colintivy
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Posts: 1,375
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Registered: ‎07-03-2008

Re: New Laptop

@Jeremy. That is a comfort. I will go down the 64bit route as bags of memory is available. I shall do a clean instal of Mint 11 because the new laptop only has Win 7 aboard, now in a 250GB batch of partitions. The remaining 200GB will be the extended partition with the three for Mint and one tiddler for the HP Guph. The /home will be all that the instal puts into it initially, I have my Ubuntu /home in a back-up on a USB stick and,      presumably I can just transfer the bits that I will want.
@HB I notice that you insert a boot flag for one partition  and a boot label for another. I seem to remember that the insertion of these is done manually in Gparted  and assume that the flag is for Mint  itself. I do not understand the purpose of the label.
From earlier posts I believe that the system will query which OS I want to use on booting-up automatically. If not what is the drill to do this?
Progress at last!
Thanks
VileReynard
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Re: New Laptop

That boot flag indicates that the partition is bootable - you can set it in gparted, although I don't actually know if Linux needs it.
The partion label of "boot" was me trying to reduce confusion by giving the partitions names - so I would allocate space for the /boot partition in boot, /home sits in home etc...
(It stems from a time when I wiped all partitions except /home.
I'd advise that you don't use any special characters such as spaces - just a-z.

"In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Aardvark."

HairyMcbiker
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Registered: ‎16-02-2009

Re: New Laptop

Ignore my boot partition it is a red herring, I was playing about and thought it might be useful - NOT. It will be removed when I get around to rationalising the system again.
Grub2 should find all the existing OS's and offer you a menu to select which you want. If you want a fancy boot loader then look at Super-Boot-Manager  (http://www.sourceslist.eu)
See my attachment for my "grub" screen. (Using burg and showing all 4 OS's installed)

Ben_Brown
Grafter
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Registered: ‎13-06-2007

Re: New Laptop

Quote from: A
That boot flag indicates that the partition is bootable - you can set it in gparted, although I don't actually know if Linux needs it.

Nope, it doesn't need it.
colintivy
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Registered: ‎07-03-2008

Re: New Laptop

I have finally got stuck into trying to boot Mint11 into laptop. I have deleted the little HP  partition (well backed-up) using the Win 7 facility, I notice that the partition is still there but labelled "unallocated". Should it be removed altogether? If so, how?? Win7 does not seem to notice so far.
I have tried the Mint 64 bit disk and it seemed to go through all the motions and loaded some files with a lot of disk-work after the Mint opening page saying that it will restart in n seconds. Eventually the screen went black and stayed like it. Subsequently I have tried the 32 bit variety and, in desperation, the Linux Format DVD all to no avail. Of course the BIOS is set to DVD Drive first as required. Each time I opted for the "try it out first" method to run it from the disk. Would it be sensible to go for the "Install it now" option (a bit scary?)
When I was Ubuntuing I had no difficulties with re-installs at all, booting up as expected.
I must have missed something, or could it be a low trick of M$ to continue to make life difficult for us?
Words of comfort please!
HairyMcbiker
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Re: New Laptop

OK it should have asked you where to put the install (which partition etc)
When you booted the disc, it would get to a desktop with INSTALL on it, did you double click on that?
VileReynard
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Re: New Laptop

Quote
I have finally got stuck into trying to boot Mint11 into laptop. I have deleted the little HP  partition (well backed-up) using the Win 7 facility, I notice that the partition is still there but labelled "unallocated". Should it be removed altogether? If so, how?? Win7 does not seem to notice so far.

That is fine.
Win 7 does not notice - the only time it would be used is by HP utilities which can reset everything back to the day you bought it.
Since the space is not used, it is available for allocation - but it's so tiny that I would just leave it as it is.
If you just booted from the live DVD to try out the system, it would not reboot unless you took the shutdown & restart  option, which you would only do if you had finished your current trial of Mint session.
It wouldn't use the disk either - although it would probably make excessive use of the DVD.
If you can't get an internet connection on the CD trial, you would want to do some investigation before installing.
How much RAM do you have - I found that Ubuntu used to act a bit funny in "only" 512MB...
There are some special startup options which may help - laptops have a lot of fancy power saving options, which may need to be disabled for the trial.
Couldn't tell you what they are though.
Make sure you put /home in its own partition when you eventually install.
(At this stage that may sound a bit cryptic)

"In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Aardvark."

colintivy
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Registered: ‎07-03-2008

Re: New Laptop

Thanks Jeremy,
I have 4GB of RAM which is now usual with the HP Pavillion dv6 so that is not a problem. If you look back at earlier posts you will see that a separate /home is going to be a separate
partition. My concern was with the  remains of the HP partition that it might be still considered as the 4th  Basic partition and queer the pitch when trying to instal the Extended partition when I got to the gparted bit of the Mint installation.

It may be that I did not do the shut-down and restart as you suggest. This time I will not go along the "Try it" option but to the full instal one. I did expect that the trial one, working entirely from the Live disk, would behave like it did when playing with the various versions of Ubuntu on my old laptop. Slow of course but the opening pages appeared just if a full instal had been done. You seem to imply that it should do when I had "finished with my current trial of Mint session"  I never got that far!!
No more time to fiddle now,  SWMBO has organised lunch out !!!
VileReynard
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Re: New Laptop

Having or not having empty or otherwise partitions will have no effect on anything.
They are empty!
Quote
It may be that I did not do the shut-down and restart as you suggest. This time I will not go along the "Try it" option but to the full instal one. I did expect that the trial one, working entirely from the Live disk, would behave like it did when playing with the various versions of Ubuntu on my old laptop. Slow of course but the opening pages appeared just if a full instal had been done. You seem to imply that it should do when I had "finished with my current trial of Mint session"  I never got that far!!

Correct!
I also said that you shouldn't try for a full install to your hard disk, if the trial from CD doesn't work.
Expect a full install to disk to ask for a single reboot part way through and don't interrupt it.

"In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Aardvark."