Linux on a Small Partition

ahh yes very sorry about that, i did it and am using Mandriva now! I love it!

 

Good job, glad to hear it. Pretty nice partition tools in the installer, huh? Drop us a line if you need any more help down the road.

-AT

 

yeah much better than windows, and the whole first impression of mandriva is nice, all i want to do now is customise it and make it look how I want it to look, not how its restricted to in windows, any good tips for configuring desktop etc would be greatly appreciated.

 

If you're talking about customizing KDE, I'd recommend using the KDE control center, found in K-Menu --> System --> Configuration --> Configure Your Desktop ...it's got pretty much everything in there; you can change pretty much every little thing. If you choose to run other desktop environments as well, such as Fluxbox, Enlightenment, WindowMaker, or XFCE for instance, the configuration process is a little different for each. However, every Linux GUI I've ever tried worked well and was highly configurable, so experiment away! Remember, as long as you don't run as root, you can't mess anything important up. Get in there and get your hands dirty!

 

cool thanks a lot
run as root?...i dont understand (probably sounding/being a right n00b)

 

It's somewhat similiar, though of course better seeing as it's around for decades as opposed to a few years, to running Win XP as an administrator rather than as an unprivelieged user. You will always have a root account which gives you the ability to create, alter, delete, etc. any file anywhere on the disk. As a normal user you get a very limited amount of access to the files and the hard-drive itself. This is one reaon why Linux is very secure and practically virus-free. Even if someone did have one of the ten known Linux viruses on his computer it could do a limited amount ot damage to the system files as the user himself cannot do anything with them.

 

Right, check out this article on why Linux virii just aren't out there.

P.S. - There have never been any Linux virii in the wild. Well, there was Bliss, but it was way back in '97 and it was polite enough to ask if you wanted to be infected. If you were dumb enough to infect yourself, it even had a helpful --bliss-uninfect-files-please flag, which actually did what it claimed to do and 'uninstalled' itself. Also, unless you ran it as root, it could only infect your home dir.