response 127 of 257:

May 4 22:40 UTC 1999

The best way to make sure you don't trash your windows OS, is to install
linux on a separate hard disk.  With some care, you can even take out
the disk Windows is installed on while you're doing this, and if windows
isn't in the machine, there's no way linux could possibly trash it.

So far as the "floppies being disabled" - that sounds just plain weird.
It's possible that "floppy boot" might be disabled - if so, that's
something that you should be able to enable by booting the machine into
the rom bios setup program.

Another option might be to beg for some old hardware to install linux
on.  Linux will run fine on a 386 or 486 - machines which it would be
silly to install windows 95 or 98 or NT on.

response 129 of 257:

May 5 02:14 UTC 1999

You can do it.  You'll just have to be very careful to make sure you know
which partition is which.  What you'll probably want to do is *delete* the
partition you're replacing, and create two partitions in the resulting empty
space -- one for a Linux filesystem, one for Linux swap space.

The key here is to MAKE SURE YOU DON'T DELETE THE WRONG ONE.  :>

response 131 of 257:

May 5 17:57 UTC 1999

Either remove the battery from the MB or thre is sometimes a jumper on the
MB to clear the bios.  Find out brand/model of MB and look on internet.

response 133 of 257:

May 6 06:48 UTC 1999

Definitely, if you can't get some sort of official blessing to install
linux, don't waste your time.  It is likely that the reason your DP
people have disabled floppies, is because of fear of viruses.  Your DP
people may not be able to tell you this, because chances are that they
actually only have 1-2 qualified people who really know what they are
doing, and the rest are just preaching "the company line" without really
understanding the why.  Your DP people are probably also organized to do
their work "most efficiently", which in many cases means they don't
always listen good to external (ie, "customer" input), and may not be
prepared to deal with "exceptions" (ie, anything that is different than
what they think you need.)

If the major reason you are doing this is because of personal reasons,
and your company isn't willing to invest in your education (some are,
some aren't), then you may well have no alternative but to find your own
personal hardware and install linux on that.  One of the nice things
about linux is that it *does* run on low-end hardware.  In the US, it is
not uncommon for companies to simply throw away perfectly good 386's and
486's that would run linux fine, because they no longer runs anything
the company supports, and isn't valuable either to the company, or on
the public marketplace.

If you can interest your manager or other powers in the company in your
project, then you have a decent excuse to "do this officially".  If you
can get someone high enough on your company to bang on the DP folks,
this may be a trivial operation.  There are, in fact, perfectly
respectable reasons for your company to be interested in linux.  It is,
after all, a lot cheaper than MS$, and makes a dandy web server,
database engine, or can be used for a variety of other non-sexy jobs
that MS$ doesn't handle nearly as gracefully.  If you can find a
specific such application, and your company has any interest at all in
saving $, you may well be able "underbid" your DP department by showing
that you can do this more cheaply than they can.  This will work best,
of course, if you pick a project your DP department isn't particularly
keen on, but that other people in your organization do care about.  If
you pick a project your DP department *does* care about, or if they are
worried about being out-competed by you and put out of a job, they are
likely to underbid you anyways, and eat the costs, or can come up with
all sorts of other good reasons why they and not you should win.

In addition to picking an unappetizing project, and sounding as
non-competitive with your DP department as possible, you may also want
to consider picking unattractive hardware.  For instance, if your
project is at *all* interesting to the company, it may be easier than
you think to include a modest hardware budget in that project.  $4K may
seem like a lot of money to you, but it may be less than the monthly
electric bill for electricity.  Now, with that $4K, you could buy an
awfully sexy pentium /// system.  But you might be better off ordering a
sun system (solaris), or a power macintosh system (mklinux or darwin).
The thing is, the pentium system could easily be converted to run NT or
to play awfully nice games on the DP chief's desk, and they know it.
Even getting this machine from the loading dock to your office, without
someone putting in a bios password and installing "the standard" stuff,
could be tricky.  The sun or macintosh will be alien stuff to them -- if
they don't want to learn linux, they certainly won't be interested in
these other machines.  Chances are good these boxes will make it to your
office with a minimum of mistakes.

response 135 of 257:

May 7 05:29 UTC 1999

Two thinkgs you might want to get straight with your DP folks -- the
first thing to impress on them is that Linux is virtually immune to
viral attacks.  Not necessarily 100% immune -- but because Linux is a
protected mode OS, and has a real notion of user privileges, it's much
less prone to the problems MS has.  In addition, simply because Linux
isn't compatible with Windows, a windows virus is going to find Linux
most inhospitable.  If their major concern is viruses, then they
actually ought to be very excited about the possibility of exploring
what linux can do - in fact, linux can do SMB, file sharing, network
printing, and email, and it can do all of these things with less
resources than Windows NT, so it ought to be intrinsically interesting
to the DP folks.

The other thing to get straight with them is just how hard it will be to
reinstall Windows if you trash your machine.  The way most DP
departments try to set things up is that per-user stuff is *not* stored
on individual machines, but is instead stored centrally.  The local disk
on the PC is used to store the applications and other windows stuff.
There is some sort of central copy of a workstation disk image.  The
central file storage is backed up onto tape regularly.  If a workstation
trashes itself, a new one can be wheeled into place, installed in at
most an hour or so (from the central disk image), and the user can
resume work with their latest files.  A new machines can be set up just
as fast, and it is also possible for people to use workstations in other
offices, if necessary.  In some cases, there's no local disk at all, and
instead the machine is booted "from the network", and has only network
disks mounted.  These schemes are big wins for the DP department;
instead of treating each user machine as a special case, and sweating
blood if one of them blows a disk, they can do most things centrally,
with much less effort.  So, if your DP department does stuff like this,
trashing windows shouldn't be any big deal - it's just a special case of
the "blown disk".  If they can give you the details on how to reload a
system "from scratch", then they could let you worry about this if you
manage to kill windows, and save themselves that much more grief.  If
trashing windows *is* a big deal for your DP department, then they are
already asking for trouble -- on a personal level, a blown disk is a
relatively rare event, but on a company wide basis, if the company is of
any size at all, a blown disk will become almost a daily occurrence.  In
any event, if your company *does* treat each machine as a special case,
they really *ought* to have some means to back up machines, and restore
them from the backup copy.  If you can arrange to try to install linux
after one of the regularly scheduled backups, or if you can arrange for
a special backup just before installing linux, you really shouldn't have
any fear of trashing Windows, although you'll still want to be a bit
careful.

Also, one other thing, even if you can't find a complete separate
system, have you tried finding *just* a spare hard disk?  You might find
that quite a bit easier than a complete system, and it may be less scary
to install linux on a separate drive than to figure out how to shrink
the windows partition and add a linux partition on an existing drive
(although, supposedly, this is not hard to do.) A small IDE drive (which
should be easiest to get) may not give you enough room to install X,
sources, and man pages, but it's at least enough to give you a compiler,
shell prompt, and the basics of linux.  The more solidly committed your
company is to windows (instead of dos), the more useless a spare 100 Mb
IDE drive will be.  Something worth doing here is to see if your company
has a pile of "dead, dunno why" PC's sitting in the corner somewhere.
This is a good place to look for that 100 Mb IDE drive.  If your shop is
Windows-centric, you have good prospects of finding a 100 Mb drive,
because it's not large enough to hold Windows or otherwise be "useful".
If there are enough dead machines, you can also play Dr. Frankenstein
and swap computer components until you put together a live system.  That
is, if someone else hasn't already beaten you to this.

response 137 of 257:

May 11 17:48 UTC 1999

Of course your DP folks said "no" to you.  This is what they are trained
to do.  You are trying to convince the wrong people.  You need to
convince your managers.  Your DP folks will be trained to say "yes" to
anyone of sufficient rank.  What "sufficient" means depends on the
company, but as a general rule, figure out who has purchasing authority,
and proceed from there (power of the purse strings).  In any event,
don't proceed unless you can get someone to say "yes" who outranks the
project managers that would have to approve a disk restore should you
manage to zap windows.  If you can't do this, consider switching
companies.  If you proceed, and don't have sufficient permission, you
could end up involuntarily switching companies.

You have to be careful about partitioning for several reasons:
 (1) it's hard to redo later
 (2) if your partition tool allows you to overlap partitions, you
        may be able to destroy other data on the disk.
 (3) if you get something too small, you may run out of space.
        if you get something too large, you may be wasting space; less
        serious but still annoying.
 (4) a swap partition is backing store for your computer's main memory.
        I think windows uses a special swap file for this.  Some versions
        of unix also support swapping to a file, but in general, this
        is less efficient than swapping to a large linear partition.

response 139 of 257:

May 11 22:51 UTC 1999

        No. M$ is completely igerment.

response 141 of 257:

May 13 05:54 UTC 1999

there may be another alternative....
  I believe that RedHat 5.2 CD-ROm is bootable itself.  I also believe
that there is a 'demo mode' which will create ramdisk, and then call for
mounting of the 'live filesystem' CD which is included in the boxed set.
This will let you get a feel for working with Linux without making any
permanent changes to your system.  Of course, it's dependent on having a
PC that can boot from CD.  Mine are all too old, so I can't try this
myself.  You said that your floppy drives have been disabled.  I wonder if
they also disabled the boot from CD option in the bios, as well.
  This method would give you a clean system every time you booted it, so
you couldn't do much in the way of customization.  The next step would be
to create an UMSDOS filesystem.  This does not require re-partitioning,
but instead is a unix filesystem creatted within a DOS file.  for that
matter, you can do a full linux installation in a UMSDOS filesystem.

Unfortunately, all my spare hardware is sitting right here at my feet in
Michigan.  The shipping charges to India would be much greater than the
hardware is worth.  For that matter, this weekend I'll be attending a
convention in Dayton, OH which is reputed to be the largest electronic
flea market in the world.  Typically, sunday afternoon the parking lot is
littered with hardware the vendors don't want to haul home.  I wish I
could think of a way to send you a container full of PC parts!

response 143 of 257:

May 13 17:13 UTC 1999

I don't remember an option, however, to boot a live system directly from
the CD.  The live-system-from-cd option I saw required a minimal
partition on the HD, I believe.  Granted, the last time I looked at it
was quite a while ago.  BTW, RedHat 6.0 is out.

response 145 of 257:

May 13 21:23 UTC 1999

Here is what the RedHat 5.2 FAQ says on the subject:

E.6.12.1 Question

I would like to be able to use the live file system on the cdrom to
boot. 

E.6.12.2 Answer

Red Hat Linux no longer supports the Live boot feature due to the change
to a modular kernel. Because of this change, booting from read-only file
system is not practical. The cdrom does contain data in
its /live section that can be executed in rescue mode, but one needs to
set the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables. 

response 147 of 257:

May 14 01:26 UTC 1999

It means you can't boot the live system on the CD-ROM.  It's only there
for the rescue disk.  

response 149 of 257:

May 14 17:59 UTC 1999

No, you can boot the CD to install.  You can't, however, boot the *live*
filesystem on the CD.  Theoretically, you could boot a real, complete
system from the CD.  However, since the advent of kernel modules, you
can't have them on a read only file system (don't ask me why) so you'd
need at least one filesystem not on the CD, so they don't see a point in
allowing you to boot the one on the CD except for rescue purposes.  (I
hope that was clear enough...)

response 151 of 257:

May 14 23:01 UTC 1999

        Well, it's real HARD to mung up a R/O filesystem that CAN'T become
        writable, no matter what..


        And it frees up the HDD for all the files that change..



        Think about it.