Installing Linux on a laptop

Installation
of Red Hat 6.1 on my Tecra 8000

Well
as per usual it was about 2am and I was surfing around the net in an attempt
to to find ways to get more speed out of my Tecra 8000 running Windows
98 ( PII 400, 4 gig HDD, 64M SD-RAM, NeoMagic display adapter 20x CD Drive
No external floppy ;o (heh )

Anyway
back to the reason I'm writing this .. in my quest to speed the computer
I downloaded various "Utilities" that claimed to do this but supposedly
defragging the RAM every x amount of minutes and "optimising files on
my HDD" etc etc etc, well I seriously doubt any of them made one scrap
of difference IF they did happen to make a difference at al it would have
only been filling up my hard drive with crap... Well I was still on a
mission to get better performance so I decided to take the plunge and
install Linux on it.. After a few quick keywords in the good 'ol search
engine www.dogpile.com, I found Red
Hat should run perfectly on the Tecra 8000 and all of the 8000 series
hardware is supported so I raided a mates CD Collection and found a copy
of Red Hat 6.1 which I proceeded to pinch from him *Thanks pSi ;oP*

Anyway
I had a quick look at the docs on installing Linux and Windows on the
one Hard Disk and every doc I read recommend using FIPS to repartion the
drive so naturally I decided to give it a go .... I defragged and scandisked
my drive, and attempted to repartion using FIPS, this was not as simple
as the docs made out heh since no matter what I did to my HDD it would
not free up the final few clusters on the disk so FIPS was unable to repartion
the drive... so I sat looking at the computer and swearing a little at
it because I really didn't want to have to use FDISK but it turns out
being the impatient bastard I am I didn't wanna have to wait until tomorrow
to get a copy of Partition Magic or something similar... so I backed up
all my data like a good lil hackers I am and took the plunge and ran FDISK
so I could repartion the drive.

Once
I had set the drive partitions ( 2.5 gig DOS partition and 1.5 for Linux
) once this was done it was a straight forward task to instal Red Hat,
I was surprise at how easy and smoothly the install actually was... I
booted from the CD because I don't have a floppy drive, and it booted
to the 1st Linux install screen, after hitting enter it then brought up
the Red Hat Logo ... and I swear I breathed a sigh of relief because regardless
of oh what I had read I had convinced myself that the video display adapter
wouldn't work heh ... but it worked like a charm the install auto detected
the mouse, video card and all of my hardware which was a nice surprise after trying to install it on my desktop which just constantly rebooted
itself after setting the root password or when it began the install, the
Linux Partions I set up during the install where a 64M swap drive and
the rest of the space was allocated to the "/" partition...

After
the partitions where created and formatted and seeing I had some space
to throw around I decided to install all the packages available to me
so I had a lot of "toys" to play with and get familiar with ... Well basically
from there it installed all of the packages and then booted straight into
Xwindows where I logged in using the GNOME environment and was able to
start screwing around with it it a matter of seconds ... from the time
I started installing Red Hat until I was able to log in and start playing
was no more than 45 minutes and instantly I could see the benefits of
using Linux as opposed to Windows specially in the way of the speed increase
I got, no matter how many apps, shells or windows I opened it hardly slowed
at all yet with windows you open up 5 or 6 apps and your system grinds
to a painfully slow speed...

I
have to say it I have been converted and now my laptop only has Linux,
as soon as I can get my hands on a new Video Card my Desktop will also
be changed to a Linux Box.

OB-1

1.)
OsReview :
Red Hat 6.1 -
L33tdawg

2.)
Lockdown
: Securing your Linux box (part 1) -
L33tdawg

3.)
Remote OS
detection via TCP/IP Stack FingerPrinting -
Fyodor

4.)
Installing
Linux on a Laptop -
OB-1

5.)
Hacking
payphones - Telstra style -
OB-1

6.)
Testing modems
with a DoS attack -
L33tdawg

7.)
Avoiding detection
-
L33tdawg