Hi all, I'll be buying a new desktop PC soon (1-2 months), and one of the requirements is that it will dual boot Windows XP and Linux (probably Redhat or Mandrake, maybe Debian if I am comfortable with it by that time). I've had a lot of hassle with small/one-man companies so I've decided to go for a large one, probably Evesham or Mesh, so getting a dual-boot is pretty much impossible.
Therefore I will be getting one with WinXP Home (Pro doesn't seem to do much extra that I need), and an extra hard drive. I'll then use this extra hard drive to install Linux on, mostly ext2fs (or ReiserFS maybe, I'll just stick with the distro default) and a small (<1Gb) Fat32 for transfer since I haven't heard good things about ext2fs on Windows or NTFS on Linux. I was in PC World Braehead, today and asked about this plan, and they seemed OK about it (last year I asked the same question and they either said it would break the computer, that it would invalidate the warranty, or "is Linux a word processor?"). However the guy I spoke to said that to dual boot I would need to get Win2K Pro, since "they use different filesystems and Win2K Home doesn't use NTFS". I was quite unconvinced about this since I am pretty sure that Win2K Home does use NTFS, but is there anything in what this guy is saying? Are there problems between Linux and XP Home that are not there for XP Pro? Also has anyone tried dual booting XP and Linux? If so did you use the M$ Bootloader, GRUB, LILO or something else. Any advice and/or stories would be greatly appreciated. P.S. I almost fell over when I was in PCWorld when I mentioned Linux the member of staff I spoke to said they had a Linux machine in store. Just one, a Patriot Cyrix 533, 64Mb RAM, 10Gb HD with 17" Monitor of �399. I thought this is pretty good for a basic machine, considering it is over twice the spec of my current machine which I use almost exclusively (P200, 32Mb, 3Gb). There is no distro marked (just "Linux"), the Corel Word Processor and Freeserve access. The manager said it wasn't selling very well and is targeted only to businesses, but it is a start :-) Thanks in advance, Steven. -- email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web: http://www.murdomedia.net/ PGP/GnuPG keys: http://www.murdomedia.net/keys.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------
