On Mon, 2001-12-31 at 21:18, Steven Murdoch wrote: > 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? > Afaik, linux has good read only support for NTFS. If XP Home doesnt run ntfs, then its going to run fat, in which case your sorted, if it does run ntfs, you can create a fat partition.
The most likley cause is going to be with the boot sector and how threatened windows feels by lilo/grub. At the end of the day, as long as you have a boot floppy to boot linux just in case its not going to make much of a difference if your using home or 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. Lilo is probably the safest bet, but i dont really think it would make much of a difference which one you used. Theres no real reason why either wont work, they all just point the bios at a bit in the disk where they should read the os boot data. I havent used XP on the same machine as linux so I can't be sure. Only thing i can think of which you might want to take into consideration is if you want to run XP in a VM inside linux. XP Home has crappy networking support, > > 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 > -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------
