hacker.org

Hey, I am new here, obviously. I just wanted to take the time to introduce myslef. I hope I am posting in the right place and respect your opion if you are going to try and make me cry beacuse I am a 'noob.' And I am not going to ask you to about hacking or cracking. I am not sure what my perogative is I guess I am just bored and want to try something new. I am in my mid twenties.

Anyway, I hope it is not too soon to post a question. I am thinking about partitioning my 2nd HDD (160G) to play around with a new OS, I was thinking LINUX as a start namely, debian. This is an internal HDD and there is nothing on it as of yet. So I was thinking about leaving my primary or master HDD alone and just installing LINUX on my empty HDD(160G). I think it would be like being able to use two seperate OS's on one computer depending on which HDD I boot from. Also I have a intel pentium dual core. So, believe the proper distribution would be this one becuase I have a 32-bit system. ----> xxx.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/ not sure if live links are allowed so .

So, I basically wnat to leave my primary alone in case I mess up and boot from the slave or the '160Gig' drive whenever I want to use Linux.

This is where I have done the most reading as it seems like a reputable site.
xxx.linux.org/ once again just replace the x's with w's

I hope I have been clear, and thank you in advance for your reply. Please excuse any improper terminology....

"There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance." -Socrates

linux.org is a good site, you should also look at linux.com and check out the download linux page. It list several distributions and some info about them. Also links to the distro website. A lot of people I know seem to like Ubuntu which is debian based or fedora which is Red hat based. You should also determine which GUI you would like to use as there are two. GNOME and KDE. KDE is setup more like the windows OS so it is suppose to be good for linux newbies to transition to as it should be somewhat familiar. You could also run linux through command mode in which you wont use a GUI (Kinda like DOS or Command prompt in windows) You can check out fedoraproject.org or ubuntu.com for more information on these distros. I have messed with Ubuntu w/ GNOME a little bit and like it. I suggest you read through the new user course on the linux.org site under the course link. It can be very helpful to people new to linux. Also Ubuntu and i think fedora both have an option to install linux while in windows. It's a little bit easier and you can select the drive you wish to install to. I hope this long paragraph is helpful. I am fairly new to linux aswell, but if you have any other questions I will try to help or direct you somewhere to find that help. Also Im sure there are others here that may be more experienced with linux. Have Fun.

Thanks for the quick reply. I didn't repsond back last night becuase I was slightly incoherent. Anyway, I took your adivce and downlaoded a disk image from --> xxx.fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora. It is obviously the fedora distribution with a GNOME GUI. However, I think I forgot to mention that my end result was to learn something about prgramming. Should I run the fedora distibution sans the GUI like you mentionned in orded to learn via LINUX??? Thanks Again.

Oh yeah, I believe I am able to run this on my sedond hard drive and only boot this OS when I choose, I am lokking for some reassurance.

when you install fedora it should install everytihng. When you boot your computer after the install it should ask you which OS you want to boot, Windows should be the default so if you dont select anything it will automatically boot windows. or you can select fedora. when fedora starts to boot you should see something giving a key to press for boot option. in there you can boot from with the gui, or without. If you have no experience with linux I suggest letting it boot with the gui. and from there explore th OS and figure out what you can. from the GUI you can run the "Terminal" which is just like running command prompt in windows. and in the terminal you can practice commands and such. The courses link at linux.org go over a few and Im sure if you did a google search for "linux commands". or something along those lines you should find plenty of tutorials and pages that explain the commands. As far as programming, all that depends on the language you want to learn. any program can be written with a simple text editor. A good language for beginners is python. You can download python at python.org they also have a tutorial on the site for beginners. Also, search google for programming tutorials for beginners, to learn some basics about programming that would apply to any language.

Oh and Ill try to post some links here to some good sites later.

Thanks again, I will be preoccupied for awhile I am sure.

With the commands..
MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT THEY DO.
If you enter the wrong command, you can fark everything.
http://www.linuxcommand.org
OR, in terminal.. Type "man bash"

Grub, will help to partition and also dual boot.