[m3trj]

OK I'm not sure if this is meant to be in the hardware section, but I'm building my own computer for the first time. I plan on running only Linux on it for the time being. I have never installed Linux on its own, so I have always set up the partitions in Windows before. I've never built my own computer before either.

I am assuming that when I first get the computer and put it all together, the hard drive will not be formatted or anything. How do I go about installing Linux on my new hard drive? Do I need to format it with some kind of floppy disk utility? Can the computer automatically boot from the CD drive (dunno if drivers are required) as I have done before with Linux installations, and then format the hard drive in the installation?

By the way the hard drive will be OEM, so just the disk and no special software or anything. It's a Western Digital 80GB IDE.

I'd really like some pointers as to how to do it. Thanks in advance.

[horndude]

Make sure the BIOS is set to boot from the cdrom and it should boot directly from the linux cd.Some distros will make partitions and format the drive for you, some wont.The ones that dont have utilities on the linux cd for you to do so.

used fdisk or cfdisk to make partitions, you will need at a minimum 2 partitions, one for the OS and user space, and a swap partition.usually making the swap partiton=double your RAM is fine, anything over 256MB isnt necessary really, 256MB is plenty.Most people these days have way more RAM than needed with linux anyway.

after that most linux distros will format the drive for you, there are several choices you may be given as to filesystem type--->ext2,ext3,reiserJFS.They all work fine, given he choice the reiser journaling filesystem is usually the best option, its more foolproof in case of a power failure.

Any other problems just post back, let us know what flavor of linux your using, sometimes that helps.

Also, what hardware choices as far as video,sound,and NIC cards or modem, you may have issues with those too.Linux doesnt have the huge driver support that windows has.

[m3trj]

Well the video card is nVidia and I do believe it will work fine in Linux.

Network card is onboard, the motherboard is an Asus P4P800-X, and it apparently uses the Realtek 8100C 10/100 Mbps Ethernet controller. In my last thread I believe intercodes said that he used the same controller and it worked in most Linux distributions. By the way intercodes, what motherboard do you use, and did you have to do anything extra to get your network card to work except set up the IP, etc?

Thanks in advance.

[intercodes]

By the way intercodes, what motherboard do you use, and did you have to do anything extra to get your network card to work except set up the IP, etc?

I have an asus A7V-v266/se . Yea, you dont need to do any driver install. It quite found my network card and is working fine....there are problems with nvidia thou....
iam still struggling to get it installed :mad: