Few newbie questions

[Jeffrey Mc]

Ahh yes, my first machine had two 5 and a something floppies, dip switches, and about 512 something bytes of RAM. So with that and DOS 2.8 I made entry into the fascinating world of PCing. I now have WIN XP pro, an eighty gig HD with four NTFS part's, pen 4 CPU and three gigs of RAM. My machine will shortly recieve a new MB, I'm thinking an ASUS with the priciest Intel i-frame. Be that as it may, I am going to be dinking around with the knoppix live ver. as I wish to flee the wrath of MS and Co. Hmm, I was using a proxy during a WIN update session and got my VLN key invalidated, lucky I had a spare lying around, heh, but realized, why, why stay with a gizmo that becomes obsolete every year, when I can run a system that is better. So, here I am, in a nutshell.

My first question is how will Linux deal with the NTFS? What is the preferred format for Linux? Do I have to have a swap (file) part. with a HD installation of Linux. I got rid of MS pagefile after I found out I could. I was concerned about the function of it, plus the HD resource (usage) of it made me despondent.

Anyway, I'll come back in a day or so, and relate my experience using the Linux live CD.

Cheers

Jeffrey Mc

[krishna.murphy]

Basically, M$oft wants to treat your hard drive like their property; you can use it, but only if you go through them to touch it. Fortunately, Knoppix has the ntfs-3g driver, so you can read and/or write the NTFS partition, with some caveats. See the news section announcement on the current state of affairs here (http://knoppix.net/forum/threads/30422-Notes-concerning-Windows-8-which-may-concern-some-Linux-users).

Cheers!
Krishna

[Denver Dave]

I haven't had any issues reading windows drives, that I think are NTFS. At the moment I can't remember the linux command to tell.

[Denver Dave]

Using the diskutility from the accessories menu, I verified that my laptop drive is an NTFS partition. I can explore the drive with the file manager launched by the icon from the task bar.