My friends laptop has 1 gig ram, 1.6-ish Ghz, 80GB harddrive, and windows died. He's not looking for stuff to mess with, it needs to pretty user friendly.. What should I install?
With those specs, he'll be able to run any distro around, go somewhere like www.distrowatch.com and read up on the top 5 or so ranked ones to find one that sounds like what you're looking for (check out websites/forums, reviews etc). Linux isn't for everyone, so just read up and know what you're getting yourself into first (and away from!). If you don't have time Ubuntu is generally a reasonably safe starting point, it dumbs down a lot of things so that almost anyone can install/maintain the system, but can start to get in the way after a while.
Agreed.. I think ubuntu is a good choice on that machine.... unless one of the modern laptop friendly distros like dream or mint appeals.
We have another problem... I installed Xubuntu cause he needed his hard drive wiped, he had a virus that was really messing up his stuff... Problem is I partitioned it wrong... It's reading his 80GB hard drive as an 8.0GB... I tried to install a puppy, but it added it on, not killed xubuntu. I can't figure out how to format it, neither will let me, and the ubuntu image i made wont boot off a Flash Drive and the C.D. Image i made Just boots xubuntu again!!! HELP!!!!
Ok.. xubuntu huh? Last time I saw that the installer was a bit dodgy.. You can either allow it to boot then use the installer on the desktop (yeah.. that's what they say) or when it boots open a terminal then hit ctrl+alt+F4 which will drop you to a console, login and type init 2 which will apparently reboot.. but should drop you to single user mode console. Then you can call cfdisk which will allow you to repartition sensibly
