I am slowly but surely getting my system sorted to try out dual booting with Linux. I havent been able to spend much time on it but have gotten a good collecion of articles about it.

This site is worth special mention cos it gives alot of information on why/how/what? Its excellent for the beginner (like me) and gave me a lot of useful insights.

http://www.uselinuxathome.com

Enjoy.

Brilliant site, OneNight!
Id also like to recommend the linux questions forum (hxxp://www.linuxquestions.org). Another great resource for beginners, intermediate and experts.

How you finding it so far OneNight?

Well, a small update on my linux exploration:
I went and got a copy of Partition Magic 8.0 which i will use to partition off 5gigs of my 40gig hd. I know theres an issue with PM which sometimes hides the MBR so i have to be careful i dont hide it.

Reading up on it a little, after getting advice from the board, Mandrake 9.1 seems to be the best option for anyone new to linux. It includes all of the functionality of linux but is encased in a nice package.

At the moment i am backing up most of my files so that in case anything does go terribly wrong i dont loose everything.

I have also got to go on a hunt for a 3.5" floppy cos i dont have any lying about. Its needed for the initial boot disc you have to create.

I have also printed instuctions on how to dual boot with winxp.

Finally, I hav ealso decided to for GRUB instead of lilo. GRUB is supposed to be more configurable yet just as reliable. My reasoning is that i am not used to either lilo or grub, so i a may as well go about getting used to the sooped up version

At the moment i don thave that much time to do the actual install and testing it all out. I am still preparing my pc for it and will then need to set aside a couple of hours to get it all up and running if there are no problems along the way...

I'll post some more once i have actually done the install and the basic configuration.

One problem I did have when installing RH was after making my first main partition, I had to make it an ext2 partition, rather than a FAT32 (which is what FIPS did), otherwise, RH couldnt make its own partitions....so partition magic did the job!

Btw..Ive found GRUB to be an excellent boot loader!

Best of luck OneNight!

I ended up also using PM 8, kept ntfs partition for xp, made a fat32 partition to be shared, then ext3 partition for RH9. I also choose Grub.

Mine is on a laptop, so I have some additional problems, my current one is a built in wireless chipset (Broadcom 11.g) that doesn't want to dance with linux .

Has anyone had trouble connecting to the Internet with their modems. I couldn't configure mine properly [Alcatel Speedtouch USB] and according to the support site it's suppose to be compatible with Linux. I know there are drivers you can download, but if it says the modem works with linux, should we have to D/L anything?

You will have to d/l drivers for it, unfortunatly USB modems and Linux dont really get along. Even if you get everything set up correctly, getting a stable connection is a nightmare!

You are better off getting an ethernet NIC card. They are only about a tenner and you will see a noticeable difference in speed when using it on windose!

Let us know how you get on whatever you do.

i prefer to have two systems and install linux on one of them and keep the other one on windows. that also makes a good security lab in my idea

Thanx guys.

thanx for the info i'm going to use that site when i'm going to install linux. And trust me I will need it

greetz Alex Trust

Thank you! This site is great.

Nice site, I'm also starting out on Linux Mandrake 9.0, as soon as I find a modem that I can use on Drake to replace my Winmodem.

Winmodems or linmodems which are the same thing. A modem without its own controller are more of a pita than its worth. My laptop has one built in, I ended up buying a pcmcia type 1 analog modem that worked fine first try. For destop most serial external modems will work first try.

Now when I can figure out my built in wireless issue