Mandrake is Vital to our Community

In which the author and a friend install Mandrake Linux on an Acer Laptop effortlessly and almost painlessly, much to the chagrin of Windows XP.

Michael J. Jordan, Linux Online Staff

February 3, 2003

The other day, a friend of mine had ordered a Acer Aspire 1300 laptop and he called me to ask for my opinion on what he should install on it. "Mandrake Linux", I immediately told him. When he informed me that the machine shipped with Windows XP pre-installed, I advised him to get a refund for it - or, as I usually put it, a "rebate" for the Microsoft tax. Having helped him to install a web and mail server using SuSE Linux and a fax server with Debian/GNU Linux in his office, he was sold on the virtues of Linux already. But he told me that he needed Windows XP to dual boot on the machine. He's a developer of accounting software for small businesses and his software runs under Windows. I had never installed Linux for a dual-boot with XP before and frankly I was a bit worried. A few days later he showed up at my house with laptop in one hand and Mandrake 9.0 disks in the other.

Having taken possession of the machine about an hour before, he hadn't even created a file with XP yet, so we were dealing with a pristine hard drive with one partition being "hogged" by Windows XP (I'll explain the "hogged" shortly). We changed the BIOS so that it would boot from the first Mandrake CD and plunked the disk into the drive. He brought along a couple of gadgets - one was a US thumb pen drive and the other was a USB webcam. We plugged those into USB ports and rebooted.

Mandrake's very attractive install program came up. Please allow me a simple caveat here. This is intended as an opt-ed piece, so my intention is not to walk through the installation with you. It was actually so easy, I really wouldn't have to anyway. We just hit two snags, which had nothing to do with Mandrake. Our first snag was that when we asked Mandrake to resize the hard disk, something which is was perfectly capable and willing to do, it informed us that all it could coax from Windows XP was 1 gigabyte. As we all know, once any version of a Microsoft operating system is installed on a hard drive, it rules that drive like a lord over its fiefdom. Windows XP had informed us earlier that it had more than 12 gb of the disk's 20 gb free but "free" in this case meant free for XP to use. Luckily, my friend had bought a copy of Partition Magic and the factory had installed XP with a FAT32 file system so we just used Windows itself to give us the space we needed for Mandrake. Nothing better than fighting fire with fire! Mandrake recognized almost all the hardware, including the aforementioned gadgets and the installation of a desktop system was quickly underway. This was so simple, I would safely let anyone alone to do it.

As I mentioned, it recognized almost all the hardware. What it didn't recognize was the WinModem installed in the machine. WinModems, in case you don't know, are designed to run under MS WIN-dows (hence the term WIN-Modem). Really, the best term for it would be LOSE-modem, because a lot of the time you're out of luck if you're running Linux. But thanks to the scores of Linux developers who don't like to lose, many of these modems will work. We were lucky enough to find a Mandrake RPM with drivers to run it and after installing the Linux kernel sources, it began to dial. After we configured KPPP, typing the command 'route add default -gw' plus the IP address of my friend's Internet service provider allowed us to surf the net. Sans problemes, as the developers of Mandrake would say, we had a the Acer laptop fully functioning with Linux. "Mandrake is great!" my friend remarked. Then cold reality slapped me in the face.

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