A few computer questions

[Lenina Rosenweg]

I got a new laptop recently and I have a few questions.

First, I want to install Ubuntu Linux.I plan to use some open source astronomy and 3 D software and also experiment and learn. My machine is 80 gig HD. I don't want to get rid of Win, I use it occasionally, I have downloaded books and stuff on it. How much should I partition the HD?

Is there an easy way to transfer files-Word and pdf from Win to Linux? Should I just burn a CD?

How do I open a .rar file (on Win or Linux)? I have tons of leftist books, including EP Tompson's 'History of The English Working Class" I've been dieing to read but I can't open the files.

Also I remember years ago there used to be SETI software one could use to help in the "search for extraterrestrial intelligence" Is this still available and does this have any degree of popularity today? Is this project something that is worthwhile to help out or is it merely US military/NASA propaganda?

I'm posting here because tech forums I visit tend to be filled with incomprehensible technogibberish way over my head.

[StoneFrog]

-root partition should be about 8GB ( it hink min is 4 but i wouldn't go lower than 8 )
-swap partition is double your RAM

but thats just a bare stuff, you will want more space if you plan on using it often, also a home partition is good, which is where all your personal stuf can be kept.

you can give permission to acess the windows partition, i think ubuntu comes with the needed modules.

http://www.win-rar.com/

I think the ubuntu package is unrar from package manager.

[The Dark Side of the Moon]

right click computer, manage, then go to disk management under storage, then click on it and shrink it. then using the unallocated space make a new partition

[CommunityBeliever]

Is there an easy way to transfer files-Word and pdf from Win to Linux? Should I just burn a CD?That is one way you could transfer the files, however, if you a burn a CD in Windows it may not be readable by Linux. That happened to me a few times. You should be probably use a USB drive instead.


How do I open a .rar file (on Win or Linux)? The rar format is proprietary. If you don't mind proprietary packages, ubuntu-restricted-extras includes unrar.


Is this project something that is worthwhile to help out or is it merely US military/NASA propaganda?I don't think it is very practical right now.

[bezdomni]

First, I want to install Ubuntu Linux.I plan to use some open source astronomy and 3 D software and also experiment and learn. My machine is 80 gig HD. I don't want to get rid of Win, I use it occasionally, I have downloaded books and stuff on it. How much should I partition the HD?

You will probably want to make the Windows partition the larger partition, since (a) Windows takes up more space than Ubutntu on its own and (b) Linux can mount your NTFS (or Fat32 or whatever) partitions but Windows (IIRC) cannot mount the Linux ext3 (or ext4 or whatever) partition.

In other words, you can access your music/videos/documents/whatever stored on your windows partition under Linux (I think you might not be able to write to an NTFS partition under Linux though, but you should double-check this).

I would say give Ubuntu about 10 GB at least (if you really think it's important to keep Windows, that is :P).


Is there an easy way to transfer files-Word and pdf from Win to Linux? Should I just burn a CD?

You could do a number of things.

If you're going to dual boot, then yes it is easy. Just mount the Windows partition under Linux (I think it does this automatically) and you can access your files from Windows partition.

Alternatively, yes you could burn DVDs or back them up on something like google docs and access/download them wherever you are.

Or put all of the PDF/Word/whatever files in a folder and make a zip archive for them, put the zip file on a USB drive, and copy them wherever you want.


How do I open a .rar file (on Win or Linux)

RTFM (http://linux.die.net/man/1/unrar) ;)

Probably more helpful, but read the manual page also. (http://linux.dsplabs.com.au/rar-and-unrar-extract-files-under-linux-shell-rar-compression-and-decompression-tools-p8/)

(Questions like this are easy to answer with google.)

So this means (when you are in Linux), you can do this.

Go to Accessories -> Applications -> Terminal (this opens the command line).

[$ denotes the command prompt, ~ denotes your home directory]

$ cd ~/path/to/your/rar/files
[replace this obviously with the actual path]

$ unrar e archive.rar
[again, replace this obviously with the right file name]

$ find . -name '*.rar' -print0 | xargs -I{} -0 -n 1 unrar e -y '{}' >unrar.log 2>&1
[Here you actually don't have to change anything, use this if you have a lot of files to unrar, see the second link above for details on what this does (because it is cool).]


Also I remember years ago there used to be SETI software one could use to help in the "search for extraterrestrial intelligence" Is this still available and does this have any degree of popularity today? Is this project something that is worthwhile to help out or is it merely US military/NASA propaganda?


[email protected] (http://folding.stanford.edu/) is a cool project.


-swap partition is double your RAM

This is not really the case anymore. I have 3 GB RAM and 2GB Swap space and practically never use swap space (even when I am running a Windows XP Virtual machine).

Everyone says "swap is double your RAM" but that was back when people had 128 MB RAM and it quickly got used up so they would need swap space just to keep the computer usable.

The less RAM you have the more swap space you need. For most people probably the minimum is fine, or double the minimum required if you want to be conservative.

Here is a relatively gentle introduction to using Ubuntu:
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/

[bezdomni]

Here is a pretty extensive cheat-sheet for Linux commands: linux terminal commands (http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/244)

[StoneFrog]

SovietPants your right about not really needing the double the RAM for swap if you have a good amount of RAM, but without knowing what RAM OP has i thought better to just keep it to double the RAM. Anything over 2GB i dont normaly do the double rule. On my 8GB RAM machine i use 4GB swap just to be as you said conservative, even though i dont use it all.

[Ocean Seal]

I got a new laptop recently and I have a few questions.

First, I want to install Ubuntu Linux.I plan to use some open source astronomy and 3 D software and also experiment and learn. My machine is 80 gig HD. I don't want to get rid of Win, I use it occasionally, I have downloaded books and stuff on it. How much should I partition the HD?

I believe that one user posted before that the SWAP partition should be double your RAM, but I personally would have a more than 8GB on your root partition.


Is there an easy way to transfer files-Word and pdf from Win to Linux? Should I just burn a CD?

Linux (which I'm using right now lol) has the evince command which allows you to view pdf files and has openoffice.org to edit your word files.
Also you might be interested in latex for making certain pdf files.
So if you use Terminal type
evince file.extension
//gives you pdf files
openoffice.org file.extension
//opens your word documents




How do I open a .rar file (on Win or Linux)? I have tons of leftist books, including EP Tompson's 'History of The English Working Class" I've been dieing to read but I can't open the files.

unrar file.rar

Also you might need to install unrar so try sudo apt-get install unrar if you're using ubuntu, I forget what it is for Fedora but you could look that up fairly easily. My guess is that by searching how to install packages on Fedora you could easily find some helpful links. I like Fedora better but Ubuntu can be used more easily so I would reccomend Ubuntu because I had trouble installing some software on Fedora so I switched over and I don't really have any problem with Ubuntu with the exception of running some windows applications.




Also I remember years ago there used to be SETI software one could use to help in the "search for extraterrestrial intelligence" Is this still available and does this have any degree of popularity today? Is this project something that is worthwhile to help out or is it merely US military/NASA propaganda?

This I don't know.

[MarxSchmarx]

Get a USB pendrive. It's cheap, and it will have more than enough space for a linux distro and EP Thompson's collected works :D

It sounds like you want to just get your feet wet with Ubuntu? I suggest wubi, it's really easy to set up from a windows environment and walks you through the steps of having a dual booting environment. 80 G is plenty.

Anyway, my sugggestion is to play around with Ubuntu as much as you can before you decide to forge ahead with it. There is a lot that Linux can do, but as other posters have noted, there are as many solutions as their are questions! which makes it kinda fun IMO.

SETI as far as I know is still around although farming out their analyses has become less of an issue since commercial level hardware can handle a lot of their data sets now.

As far as 3d rendering, the issue comes down not so much to your OS but to your graphics card - esp. the RAM on the GPU as opposed to the RAM on the machine. I'm not too familiar with the astronomy programs out there, but my guess would be that most developers work with Ubuntu so they should be able to take advantage of the latest hardware on Ubuntu systems. You might want to PM maldoror he does a lot of computational physics stuff and may be able to walk you through the steps. If you want to do hardcore numerical computations I think you will (a) use a desktop and not a laptop but (b) need to be conversant in unix as most software development in the natural sciences occurs in a unix environment.

[NewLeft]

I don't recommend wubi, it can be very slow and I had problems with drivers.

[MarxSchmarx]

I don't recommend wubi, it can be very slow and I had problems with drivers.

Really? It worked like a charm for me.