View more guides at Linux Wiki Guides
If you would like to edit this page please first view our Editing Guidelines.
In this article we will be discussing ways in preparing your computer for Linux. While this article is focused on laptops, most of the information presented will be useful for desktop computers as well.
While installing Linux we will be modifying the partition table on your hard drive. Unless you don't care about the contents of your hard drive, it is highly recommended that you create a backup of your system before proceeding any further.
Please also make note that most laptops don't come with recovery CDs anymore, rather they have a hidden partition on your hard drive to store this data. However most manufacturers provide you a utility to create the CDs required, so you may also like to make use of this. Warning: You will likely see this hidden partition when you use a partitioning tool. I would highly recommend you leave it totally alone unless you know what you are doing.
There are two ways of installing Linux on your laptop, either as a dual boot system with Microsoft Windows or a standalone system with just Linux. If you choose the later then you may continue to step 3 as all that is required is to wipe the hard drive clean.
If you have chosen a dual boot system (as you want to use both Microsoft Windows and Linux) then you will need to prepare your hard drive to hold both. Since most laptops come with Microsoft Windows pre-installed, it is normal for the entire space on your hard drive to already be allocated to Windows.
First, decide how much space you would like to allocate to each operating system. I would recommend leaving a minimum of 10GB for both. Since most Windows installations supplied with modern laptops are using the NTFS filesystem which Linux can not write to, you may also like to consider leaving room for a small FAT32 partition. FAT32 is the only file system both Windows and Linux can easily read and write to, so a small partition may be useful in transferring files from Windows to Linux and back.
Next you will need to purchase or download an application which is capable of resize a NTFS partition. The most popular one is Partition Magic but I like to use BootIt NG. How to use these utilities is out of scope for this document, but you should resize the NTFS partition to the size you want and create the FAT32 partition if you would like one. Don't create any Linux partitions just yet, let the Linux installer do that.
Many laptops will not boot from the optical drive by default so you will need to find how to get your laptop to boot from it. You should read your laptop's manual for this information but you normally need to push either the ESC, F1, F10 or F12 key when you turn on the system. Insert your installation CD/DVD into your optical drive, press the correct key to bring up the boot menu and select the optical drive. You should now be booting from the Linux installation CD.
You should now be ready to install Linux. You may like to read our installation guides for details on how to install a number of different Linux distributions.