Linux

[FluffyFluffers]

Okey I'm planning to move onto it.
(I know which one I am useing)
A few quick question

Can it run normal games(left4dead)
Could it be installed on a external USB HDD?

I'll have some more later today.

 

[chevre]

Can it run normal games(left4dead)

If by "normal" you mean Windows games, then no, not directly. However, there are two packages that allow varying degrees of support for Windows apps:

• WineHQ - Run Windows applications on Linux, BSD and Mac OS X
• TransGaming Inc.

Wine maintains a list of what software is known to work / not work at present.

Could it be installed on a external USB HDD?

Sure. Assuming your BIOS supports booting from USB this is certainly doable.

 

[FluffyFluffers]

Guess I'll keep windows then and duel os.

 

[Grutzvalt]

I had Ubuntu installed before (dual boot WinXP/Ubuntu), but it was completely useless because I know how to use Windows well. Linux is honestly not for me, I tried it and hated it. I already had Microsoft Word (it's good software, just over priced), and OpenOffice just didn't cut it for me. I do a lot of creative things (like Photoshop, video editing, etc.), and Ubuntu just ddin't cut it. I had all of my documents, software, porn, and other stuff on my Windows partition, and maintaining two OS's was too hard. Did I mention how freakin' hard it was to delete the Ubuntu partition and allow Windows to use that space?

 

[FluffyFluffers]

That Is why I was asking about the external HDD .

 

[EmmEmmThree]

You're external HDD *will* work, wether it be NTFS or FAT32 formatted. If it is NTFS, you're going to need NTFS-3G.

 

[DotDotDot]

If you want a cool project, install some form of Linux on a thumbdrive. It's pretty cool.

I was running Linux for a while on one of my computers. Unfortunately, classwork required office 2007 and OpenOffice doesn't work with the new 2007 format yet.

 

[FluffyFluffers]

>_> I'm going to have fun with this.

Just wondering can I boot linux on other computers if I have it one my external HDD.

 

[EmmEmmThree]

No, if you install Linux on your external HDD then you'll be able to boot it on your computer -- unless it's a portable version of Linux. The reason is, there are drivers and configuration files that are designed around your system. Trying to boot on a different system will obviously have the wrong settings/configurations than your own machine.

 

[r0bino]

If you install Linux onto an external HDD it will work on other computers if they can boot from the external HDD. You will have problems in the form of no GUI if the graphic card chip is very different (like ATI instead of Nvidia), but there are some standard drivers you could use for the x-server that work on many different systems. Drivers shouldn't be an issue because the Linux kernel decides itself what drivers are needed as far as I know (but I'm no expert), and common distributions pack all common drivers into the kernel. I've installed Ubuntu 7.04 on an external HD myself before and had said GUI issues, but it booted and I was able to do what I wanted to do (make a HDD backup). I also got the x-server running again, but you'd have to make an extra config for every PC you want to boot it on.

It's a wild guess, but maybe mm3 was talking about the HDD config that might get messed up. New linux distributions usually do this right, but if you are getting a linux made for this purpose anyway you won't have the config issues described I guess

 

[DannyTheNinja]

What I would do is install Fedora 10 on your external hard disk and set it up with a very large (10-20GB) overlay image. Your overlay image is essentially the free space you start with. That will let you get the just of Linux, plus you can run it on any computer since Fedora Live is a portable distro.

--Danny :ninja:

 

[h3g3l]

>_> I'm going to have fun with this.

Just wondering can I boot linux on other computers if I have it one my external HDD.

If you want a portable "Linux Everywhere" environment, a thumb-drive (for data) and bootable CD of Knoppix has served me quite well! It'll be the easiest to set up, especially if you don't own each of these machines.

If you do computer forensics (yo) a Helix (Knoppix with some nice tools) boot CD is good.

At the other end of the spectrum, something with a busybox shell (e.g. Damn Small Linux [DSL]) or another micro-kernel (QNX) will get you up and running. QNX even has a GUI and networking, so you can boot up and use the image to surf the web (using the machine's interface), and then reset the box and walk away.

You'll want to consider why you're doing this, as that answer will drive your solution - all the way from a 10-20GB drive and equipment to a 1MB compressed boot image.

 

[Deleted member 221]

I had all of my documents, software, porn, and other stuff on my Windows partition

ahh classic,the i had all my documents,music,pics,and...porn on there and i cant give it up. hehe

anyways try an external(btw doesn't using a USB device to boot from slow donw the speed considerably?).

 

[EmmEmmThree]

I use my server as my storage-center. Although, not everyone has a server. Likewise, not everyone has a second computer! Or, heck, a second hard drive!

If I were in that position, I would use a separate drive for my "shiz" -- as I'll call it -- or if I only had one drive, I'd use a dedicated partition for it.

anyways try an external(btw doesn't using a USB device to boot from slow donw the speed considerably?).

Yes and No. If you were going from a SATA (3Gbps - steady) to USB (480Mbps - variable!) external drive, you would notice a bit of sluggish performance as you would compare to SATA. Although that's just USB -- external drives like FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 have constant speeds of 400Mbps and 800Mbps respectively, which even though FW400 has a smaller maximum speed than USB, the consistancy of that speed can be a huge advantage. FireWire is usually chosen by those who *need* external storage (and can't have a server ) such as on-the-go video and graphics editors who can't suffice with the lag of USB speeds constantly going up and down.

eSATA is another story, as eSATA is essentially a SATA port (again, 3Gbps) that's been put to the outside of your computer's case, so that you can plug in a drive without tearing apart your system (and, SATA's hot-swapping ftw!)

 

[chevre]

Sure, as long as you have proper support you'll be able to take the drive with you to any machine you want. It's similar to using a LiveCD, except you'll be using an external HDD.

Check Boot and run Linux from a USB flash memory stick | USB Pen Drive Linux. Generally it's done with a USB stick for convenience, but same principle applies to external HDD.