I'm a Linux newbie looking for some technical advice before I install RedHat Linux 7 on my computer.
I have a custom-build box: MSI K7T266 Pro (MS-6380) ATX Mainboard 1.4GHz 133FSB K-7 Athlon 512MB DDR PC266 ATI Radeon 32MB DDR AGP Pioneer 16X DVD-ROM Liteon CD-RW 12X10X32X External ZIP-100 Lexar CF/SM reader (USB) Epson Stylus Color 640 printer 56K/V.90 modem (not sure which brand but I can find out, if needed) 10/100 BaseT PCI Net Card (again, not sure of brand) 15" monitor (came from my last computer, a Toshiba Infinia 7160) I have two HDD: 40.9 GB Ultra ATA100 7200 (Western Digital) This is my master drive on which I have installed Windows 98SE 30.7GB Ultra ATA100 7200 (Maxtor) This slave drive is formatted for Windows but is empty. I want to do a dual-boot install with the slave drive fully dedicated to Linux. I have the Osborne Complete Reference for Linux with associated CD-ROMs (RH Linux 7, Caldera OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4, and SuSE Linux 7.0) Questions: Do I have everything I need to do this, and can I create a dual-boot system? Are these components compatible for Linux? What partition sizes would be best, given the size of my drive (30.7GB)? Is LILO recommended, or should I just boot Linux from a floppy? The book has fairly complete installation instructions (I think), but if anyone out there has tips and/or tricks I'd certainly appreciate it. I've done a small amout of work on Linux systems (a little bit of C and Perl programming), but I've never installed or configured a new system. I'm familiar with using only Red Hat, so if anyone has reccomendations for the other distributions, I'm all ears. Thanks in advance for your help. Joey Davis, CA
