[trevor1]

Hello, i have recently recieved a 20gb hard drive, i have already installed mandrake/winxp dual boot system. i was wondering if its a good idea to switch to Red Hat, i am farely good with mdk and i really like it.

[codejockey]

Well, what do you hope to gain from switching to RedHat? If you're studying for RedHat certification, then switching is pretty much required, just to gain experience and try things out. If your long-term plans include RedHat, then maybe now is a good time to switch. If you just like to experiment, that's OK, too -- go ahead and switch, especially if you don't mind the work if you decide to switch back. Otherwise, I can't see a compelling reason to switch to RedHat, given that you know and like Mandrake.

[lynch]

Well said,codejockey.
If you read from your XP partitions while using MDK then you should remember that RH doesnt support ntfs out of the box or even include the ntfs module on the CDs.
I'd stick with MDK if you like it.
lynch

[trevor1]

What Distros do u use Lynch and Codejockey?

[lynch]

Mainly SuSE 8.1(2 comps) but I have 1 box with Mandrake 9 .I have FreeBSD on a removeable hard drive but I havent done much with it.
I started out with Mandrake 7.1 and used 8.0 and 8.1 plus Red Hat 7 and7.3.I have an old pentium box from IBM that I put slackware on.But 95% of the time it's SuSE 8.1.
lynch

[codejockey]

I use Slackware (currently runnning 8.1) and have for some time. Although I have tried to install various versions of Mandrake, I have never been successful (typically, partitioning/formatting fails, even though the same hardware happily runs Win98SE and Slackware on the same disks). I used Debian briefly, but found it too controlling for my taste. I also used RedHat 6.0 briefly, but found it bloated and "improved" in ways I didn't like.

Although my distro of choice is Slackware, you should know that the installation is primitive compared to SuSe or Mandrake or RedHat, for example. The good news is that Slackware is lean, efficient and full-featured (NTFS support is included out of the box, BTW).

Hope this helps.

[trevor1]

does rh have a dual booter like LILO?

[codejockey]

I believe RedHat includes both LILO and grub. Both of these bootloaders support multi-boot configurations.

Hope this helps.

[bassetman]

From what I understand from my current Linux Red Hat course it does come with LILO!


John

[lynch]

RH 8 comes with both and gives you a choice,I think,during installation.
lynch

[codejockey]

Just to complicate things further ...

You can also dual-boot using loadlin, if you are running a version of Windoze that still has DOS (not sure about XP and similar). Using loadlin, you boot first to DOS and then to Linux; the advantage of this method is that the MBR is not modified and any device initializations can be performed (motherboards with built-in sound, etc. often benefit from this approach). With a little work in config.sys and autoexec.bat, you can generate a boot menu for any number of OS options.

Hope this helps.

[bassetman]

Could be helpful, but definately more confusing!

John

[codejockey]

Bassetman (aka John) is definitely right -- loadlin is great when you need it but also can be confusing (what OS was I booting, again?! ). Despite this drawback, I highly recommend this method for multi-booting (assuming you want to use a DOS-based OS, including WIN3.X, WIN98, WIN98SE). One (perhaps not so obvious) benefit: when you un-install Linux, you will still be able to boot directly into your Windoze OS, without problems.

Aside to Bassetman: my Sheltie sends his best!

Hope this helps.

[bassetman]

Greeting to you and your Sheltie!

John