Newbie to Linux....help needed for a college project "Cluster Implementation"

[Acoyne]

Hi,

I have only ever used Windows and MAC operating systems to date.

I need to install Linux on my laptop which currently has Windows 10 already installed. Does anyone know how I can dual boot and what to watch out for?

The reason i need Linux as I need to have multiply node clusters setup so the model/software I wish to deploy can remain operational if one of the nodes become unavailable.

Thanks in advance.
Alan

 

[JulienCC]

Hi,

I need to install Linux on my laptop which currently has Windows 10 already installed. Does anyone know how I can dual boot and what to watch out for?

Use any tutorial you find about it. There a plenty out there. Start with any distro you like. If it doesn't work out of the box try another one.

The reason i need Linux as I need to have multiply node clusters setup so the model/software I wish to deploy can remain operational if one of the nodes become unavailable.

Well you can have a cluster of Windows machines. I guess you will go for linux because no licence is required.
You could even go with virtual machines. You set a bunch of virtual machines on your Windows system, configure the VM to share the same network. Then you can deploy your software on the VM and try to shut down some of them to see how it behaves.

 

[atanere]

I need to install Linux on my laptop which currently has Windows 10 already installed. Does anyone know how I can dual boot and what to watch out for?

Newbies often break things. You should first of all save anything important on your Windows drive to a backup USB or external hard drive. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

Linux Mint is my usual recommendation to someone wanting Linux. It behaves much like Windows, it is very good at making all your hardware work (sound, wireless, etc), and it has a huge community behind it. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of instructions already out on the web on how to setup a dual boot. Even better, if possible, is to buy another cheap computer (like a used laptop) to make Linux your only OS. Then no danger to Windows at all. Or you can run Linux inside Windows using VirtualBox or other VM software.

I don't know if its within your budget, but I've seen some reports of using Raspberry Pi's in a Beowulf cluster... looks pretty cool, but too far over my head.

Good luck!

 

[captain-sensible]

i'm probably slightly out of date since its a while since i needed windows anywhere. But if you have one OS on one hard drive then there could be bits of data all over the place. I used to start with doing a defrag to clean up the disk since if you are going to have 2 OS on on HD to need to shrink space for Windows to have room for Linux. from whats i 've read Windows 10 the way it works needs 30 Gig . So first how big is your HD ssd thingy etc. Defrag shrink partition for windows probably ( uefi, main windows) . Then you could divide rest into just 2 partitions if you want to try Slackware 1 for swap and another for main installation . You can still have normal users within main installation by the way.

Boot stuff should get written to efi partition, you might find after installing linux Windows you can't boot Windows but if you look with say gparted windows should still be there and thus its only a little learning curve to be able to choose to boot either.