yes, parted is very good. it is intuitive and interactive. it reminds me of a similar tool which is on my CD for partition magic 4 but which does not appear to come with later versions of partition magic (although a similar tool for DOS does) called PQMAGICT.EXE - pqmagict is not as good as parted and i have had ocassions when it hasn't read the partition table properly and has wiped out the whole drive. parted is more recommended. of course distros that already use diskdrake and so on in the installer will not insert parted in there as it is a scary non-GUI text based interface (oh no! don't i need to have 5 years of programming skills to use it et c).
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lazygamer:
I was wondering though, why the heck does RH9 need 400 mhz to run properly? This is Linux, not Windows. The only possiblity is that Windows cuts corners on hardware requirements by being extra unstable, Linux might do the opposite.
i don't understand what you mean here, but you'll notice that mandrake requires a pentium to run properly even though linux is an OS for the 386. The reason is, some of the programs are optimised for later processors now that most people have them, and with that CPU speed thing, red hat obviously included software that requires a certain amount of processing power to function without it appearing to have crashed (my guess is it's all the GUI tools they include). A similar analogy is that manydistros (including red hat) will not install on a partition smaller than 2.5 GB. Peanut linux installs on 600MB and slack does take up 2MB but can install on a lot less if required. A year or two ago i remember reading that 2GB would be more than enough for linux and all the programs i would ever need. And i suspect these requirements have been creeping up for a while. I think the 386 linux was originally developed on had a 30MB hard drive for instance.
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Rising system requirements on Linux wouldn't be out of hand like Windows system requirements. Maybe later versions of distros might get bloated(useless things loaded by default, things you don't need in the kernel, more eyecandyish GUIs),
this is an accurate analysis, in fact this is the case today. Install red hat and reconfigure your kernel and see how many things are included that you don't need. True many of them are included as modules, but things like infrared and PCMCIA support are only needed if you have those hardware interfaces attached to your computer.
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but not in a Windows way(so it would be bloated, but an optimized high quality bloated).
so it wouldn't be bloated, it would just be... bigger. in theory this means that you could still get by with the original requirements if you simply didn't install whatever the newer additions were. Luckily there will always be many projects on the go which aim to cram linux into a tiny space. i heard only yesterday about a distro called linux in a pillbox. it comes as seven floppies. each one is a linux bootable floppy, tailored for different tasks, like there's a hard drive recovery one, a networking one et c. I even saw a 2 floppy distro of linux that claimed to include XWindows!
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So in theory, Redhat 11(around 2004?) would probably need 600mhz at the most to run good, whereas longhorn would need well over 1GHZ to run good.
will longhorn run "good"? i doubt it, although those who pay money for it will say it does in order to justify their "investment". And those estimates are probably about right in my opinion.
[ May 14, 2003: Message edited by: Calum: hopelessly outnumbered ]