Please tell me...

[Per M.]

I'm currently using KANOTIX, but I'm thinking of giving Lunar a try. To help me consider switching, please answer these questions for me:

1: What are the benefits of using Lunar/why should I use Lunar?
2: How long could I expect it to take to install on a 1,6 GHz laptop with 512 MB RAM?
3: Can I use just one 10 GB Linux partition and a 1 GB swap partition?
4: Is dual-booting with WinXP possible?
5: Can I choose between GRUB and Lilo?
6: Is the Lunar package repository large?

I really hope you will answer theose questions, and sorry if some of them sound stupid.
Thanks in advance.

- Per
_________________
Please visit my website: http://www.permcorp.co.nr

[Moe]

Okay, here are some brief answers:

1) Please refer to our documentation concerning that topic.
2) If you're using the minimal amount of time consuming tasks (keep precompiled kernel, don't recompile anything) I'd say about 20 to 30 minutes.
3) Yes, of course. The ISO itself is about 260MB large. My lunar system (which is a full blown workstation) runs on a 12GB root partition occupying only half of the space (including XOrg, Xfce, all the tools and even the tarball cache).
4) Yes, in only depends on your lilo/grub configuration.
5) Yes.
6) It holds 2262 packages. So yes, I'd say its fairly huge.

[ElAngelo]

concerning 4:
dual-booting with winxp is perfectly possible but in contradiction with other distro's there are no instructions on how to do it... anyway if you boot with grub add this to /boot/grub/menu.lst

title=Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,5)
makeactive
chainloader +1

replace (hd0,5) with whatever partition your windows installation is on...


concerning 2:
installation of the base system (so no X, just bash and gcc and stuff like that will just take you about 20 to 30 minutes...) of course i guess you want X and a DE and other stuff... this will take longer and if you would f.e. choose kde or gnome as your DE it can take pretty long on that machine to compile... take 4 to 5 hours including X...

[Per M.]

Thanks both of you! I think I'm gonna go ahead and try it!
Now if I run into problems I can always ask here, right?

- Per
_________________
Please visit my website: http://www.permcorp.co.nr

[Moe]

Mailinglist, IRC or right here. The fatest access to direct help is the IRC channel as many of us (the developers) are hanging out there.