Things you need to know before installing Linux Alan M Durham WHO/TDR/USP Bioinformatics Course July 2003

File Systems-1 one of the main tasks of the operating systems is managing the storage of information the information in your hard disk isformatted in files the hard disks are physically organized in blocks that means your files are stored in “pieces” this way it is easy to grow and shrink files, since the space they occupy does not have to be continuous since you create, modify and remove files, the information gets fragmented fragmentation means that there are empty spaces between useful information.

File Systems - 2 each operating system has its own file system each file system manages disk space differently since most information of an operating system is inside its files, you need to create a file system to install an OS. two file sytems cannot share the same disk space however two file sytems can share the same hard disk, if you divide the disk in continuous “chunks” these “chunks” are called partitions

Preparing your computer to install Linux if need to create a partition to install linux –actually you can install linux in many partitions to not loose any of your windows files, you need to move all blocks out of the space that will be allocatted to the new partition we call this process defragmentation defragmentation will move all file blocks to one side of the disk after defragmentation you have to partition the disk, to do this you will use software provided by the linux developers.

One last question: What is “dual boot”? the operating system machine code is generally stored in your disk when you turn your computer on, it goes to a specific part of your hard disk this part contains the address of the operating system code in your disk in a dual book system, this “boot sector” will contain the address of a small program that asks you wich system you want to run. the boot program knows where in the disk the code of each operating sytems is stored. with such a “boot manager” you can actually have even more than two operating systems after installing Linux, you need to also install the “boot manager”