[dugq]

Hi,

I've been thinking of installing linux for sometime now, and I feel maybe its about time I took the plunge, but I do have a few questions.

1. I was hoping to dualboot with winxp sp2, can anybody point me to a good beginners guide for doing this?

2. I've noticed a lot of distros are optimised for particular systems. I'm using a P4 3.4, 1gig memory with SATA 250 gig harddrive. What would be a good distro suitable for a noob with this system.

3. I was planning to have three partitions, one for xp, one for linux, and another for media files. What file system can I use which will allow both linux and windows to read and write to the third partition. At the moment it is NTFS, could I stick with that?

4. I currently use Opera as my default browser and have found that I can only view some pages in IE, even if they don't use acticex, just because of how they are written. How can I view such pages in linux?

Thanks in advance for any help

Dugq

[MykeRoschbach]

I myself am a Linux newbie. I just installed Mandrake and it's pretty user friendly so far. I've been able to navigate around and get a feel for it.

http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=29

or

http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en-us/

Check it out and tell me what you think.

[asdfqwerty]

Originally Posted by dugq

1. I was hoping to dualboot with winxp sp2, can anybody point me to a good beginners guide for doing this?

That I don't know of, try google. Whatever you do make sure that you backup everything first.

Originally Posted by dugq

2. I've noticed a lot of distros are optimised for particular systems. I'm using a P4 3.4, 1gig memory with SATA 250 gig harddrive. What would be a good distro suitable for a noob with this system.

Really any distro will work with that. See this post http://forums.techguy.org/t332845.html

Originally Posted by dugq

3. I was planning to have three partitions, one for xp, one for linux, and another for media files. What file system can I use which will allow both linux and windows to read and write to the third partition. At the moment it is NTFS, could I stick with that?

No, Linux doesn't play nice with NTFS. I have this setup with FAT32, works well.

Originally Posted by dugq

4. I currently use Opera as my default browser and have found that I can only view some pages in IE, even if they don't use acticex, just because of how they are written. How can I view such pages in linux?

You are out of luck with that one. However this has never been a problem for me though.

[jakoval]

To get a feel for which distributions will both work well with your hardware and feel good to you, I would suggest that you try a variety of live cd's - distributions that run directly from CD without having to install them to hard drive. A couple listings of live cd's are HERE and HERE. There is an interesting overview of various live distros HERE.

NTFS support is improving in the newer distributions, but if it were me, I'd probably set up the media drive as FAT32.

* - edit: I'm an Opera user myself. I've found that most sites that don't work well with Opera do fine in Firefox (the obvious exceptions of course being those that rely on activex )

[dalani]

I installed Mandrake in dual boot with my Win98. I got my Mandrake CD with a Linux Introduction Book I bought so instructins were easy.
My advice: make sure you backup all your data then defragment your hard disk. Otherwise installing linux might overwrite some windows files.
I use Lilo to pick which OS to boot at startup. Works fine...

[dugq]

Thanks all, I'm defintely going to give that Live CD thing ago, seems like the best way to pick a distro

Thanks again