Re: [Trisquel-users] new user to linux

[ka1cey]

I'm glad to hear you are considering buying a pre-owned laptop, thereby  
keeping a few bits of toxic materials out of the waste stream.  Also, you're  
repurposing perfectly-good hardware.  Before installing any new operating  
system onto such a machine, I'd "shred" the drive.  You can do this from any  
GNU/Linux live image, such as Trisquel 7.  Boot the live medium, open a  
terminal, use the "lsblk" command to learn what device refers to the hard  
drive.  That done, you can do
sudo shred /dev/sda

for instance, assuming the hard drive is /dev/sda.
You could also do something like

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

This would write 0 onto the entire disk, unless you stop before it finishes.

HTH,


Dave