(Catchup: Part I. Part II, Part III)

Handy though it may be, you can't really judge an operating system running it from CD. File access times are diabolical compared with a hard disk installation. Kicking off OpenOffice.org for example takes around 40 seconds from the SimplyMepis CD. From hard disk it takes less than half that time.

Before you begin, boot Windows and defragment the drive. Also backup any important files.

So how do you install SimplyMepis locally? Start by clicking the Install Me icon on the desktop or choose Mepis Config from the K-Menu then select Install Mepis on Hard Drive.


Linux identifies disk drives by letter, starting, logically enough, with "a". The Use Disk drop-down list will show all available hard disk drives.

Unless you want to dedicate an entire drive to Linux, you'll almost certainly want to click the Run QTParted button. As its name suggests, QTParted is a partition editor. It'll show devices in their full Linux-qualified form such as /dev/hda. Select the drive you want to install to and let QTParted scan its layout.

Most Windows installations occupy the entire disk so QTParted will only show one partition. That's fine, we just need to resize it to make room for Mepis. Right-click the partition, choose Resize and adjust the slider to make some room.

How much space do you need? You can get away with as little as 3GB but I'd suggest at least of 5GB. 10GB is even better.


At present I only have one partition, so here I'm resizing it to add 10GB of free space. Here's what the partition table looks like now...
 



The new partition appears right away but changes aren't actually made to the drive till you click the Commit button. You can undo changes - up until you Commit them - by clicking Undo.

Now right-click the new partition, choose Create and select Create As: Extended Partition. QTParted will look something like this...




There are a number of reasons for turning the free space into an Extended partition. Due to historical reasons, disk drives can't handle more than four Primary partitions, and Windows won't work if more than one Primary partition is active. (Linux isn't so fussy.) What's more, you can sub-divide the disk into more than four areas under an Extended partition.

So let's do just that. I want to create a root partition (identified by the "/" symbol), a swap partition, and a home partition (identified as "/home"). Technically, Linux only requires a / and a swap partition, but keeping /home in its own area means you can upgrade the operating system without losing any of your work or settings. That makes life much, much easier!

Right-click the free space line and choose Create. This 5GB area will be for our / partition.


I'm allowing half a gigabyte for swap space as the machine I'm using has 1GB of RAM. As a general rule, set the swap space to equal your PC's RAM up to a maximum of 512MB. (Note the partition type differs for swap space.)


And the remaining space will become my /home drive...



QTParted's partition table looks a bit more complicated now, yet still strangely logical...



When you're happy with your new layout, click the Commit button to write it to disk then close QTParted. You'll find yourself back in the Installation Dialog 1 so click Next to proceed.



This should be pretty straightforward. Simply click the drop-down arrows and select the partitions you just created for each of the three partition types.

The Next button takes us to the actual Mepis installation. This will typically take between 10 and 45 minutes depending on the speed of your machine.



Once everything's installed. you're then prompted for where to put the boot loader. This is a clever piece of software that presents a menu, allowing you to choose whether to boot Windows or Linux. Unless you're a guru, stick with the defaults...



Now you're prompted to create a user account and set your own root password. (Remember when running from the CD the default user was "demo" and the root password was "root".) I suggest use more sophisticated passwords for your hard disk installation...



You're now prompted for a computer and a domain name. The machine Mepis is running on is called Boris, so...

The domain name can be anything and in most cases isn't used - unless you have a special network setup.

Note that I've set the Workgroup name to "workgroup". If your PC's part of a Windows workgroup you should set the appropriate name here. (Windows machines default to a workgroup name of "workgroup".)



In Localization Defaults I set the Locale to en_NZ (English/New Zealand). This informs the system that we use the "$" sign for currency, format our dates dd-mm-yyyy, and so forth.



And the very last option is to choose which services to enable at boot. The defaults are shown below. (Note that you can change these once the system is up and running.)



Now all that remains is to remove the installation CD and restart your PC.


So what are you waiting for...?