[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
Julian Hall wrote:
> Grant Sewell wrote:
>> Hi Simon,
>>
>> You can indeed. From with Ubuntu you'd need to reformat the Windows
>> partition as something that Linux can use reliably - ext3 is a good
>> choice for most things. I tend to do things from the commandline, so
>> here's how:
>>
> <snipped detailed instructions>
>> What you use this "new" space for is upto you - I would suggest making
>> this your actual "home" space, so you'd need to sync between this and
>> your current "home", etc, etc... but that's for another reply later. ;)
> The benefit of having /home on a separate partition is that it won't get
> wiped if you decide to reinstall or try another distro later on. All
> you would have to do is point the installer of the new setup to that
> partition for /home, remembering *not* to format it of course :) Rather
> like putting My Documents on a different partition in Windows, something
> I always do :)
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Julian
>
Thanks for the advice. I'll save these mails somewher (though there is
the DCLUG archive) for when I do remove XP. As the reclaimed space won't
be seemlessly integrated into /home/sheila and my mother has no real
need for an extra 40gb I'll leave it there for the moment.
I know I could reinstall without touching the /home partition, but
there's a bunch of stuff like drivers and crossover office that would
get nuked if I did that.
The reason mater decided to switch was because XP just ground to a halt.
The internet, broadband a direct connection from the router to the PC,
just stopped working. Pages stopped loading halfway through. I spent a
lot of time investigating the hardware, switching wifi cards etc etc
before giving up. XP pro was installed about 8 years ago and I guess a
congested registary and conflicting sets of .dll files done for it.
Ubuntu just works! Crisp and fast and so on..... The only app that
didn't have a linux equivilent was Quicken. And even then there is
Moneydance, a cross platform accounts app, but the problem is that
Quicken exports *.qif files (an accounts app standard) and the exported
data is JUNK. Moneydance would have been fine if Quicken had actually
exported cleanly, but it didn't and thankfully crossover office has
added Quicken to its list of supported apps in the last release.
The other slight problem is that mater has been using MS Office since
3.1 days and is/was an expert user, ie using function key comands that
microsoft probably have forgotten about and are only still in office
because no one remembers enough about them to get them taken out. These
combos are not in oOo and this gets winged about ("crtl alt tab F9 shift
starts the woojit macro in windows, why doesn't here!?"). But I'm not
going to tell her that crossover could run office...
The other thing I can't replace is QuickDelete, which lets one look at
e-mail headers and delete them if they're crap. But xoveroffice does run
it, however if anyone knows of an equivilent it'd be glad to know about it.
So no trauma and someone who really doesn't care about where their
software comes from and would go comatose if the ideological soundness
of OSS was explained has been migrated without tears.
S
--
Simon Robert
www.oldhouse-cottage.co.uk
--
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html