Newb Linux, Dual Boot XP Home, and Linux?

[Alias2]

Can someone recomend me version of Linux that is Newb friendly? And maybe a Guide to Dual booting XP and Linux? I have done it in the past, but can't remember how. I think I installed XP First, then Linux.

 

[bashPenguin]

Ubuntu, SuSE, and Fedora Core are all pretty nice - most people will probably tell you Ubuntu. They all have pretty good support forums and resources around the net, and automate and hide a lot of configuration and work that might confuse a beginner.

Ubuntu and SuSE will configure dual boot environments for you during the install process if you want them too, and Windows or some other OS is already installed. I believe Fedora Core does as well, but I haven't played with FC on a dual boot system.

The general recommended way to install Linux and Windows is to install Windows first, then the Linux distribution. This is because Windows XP (probably 2000, maybe Vista?) will blow away the MBR, which in turn means you have to reconfigure the system to dual boot.

 

[/dev/null]

Ubuntu, SuSE, and Fedora Core are all pretty nice - most people will probably tell you Ubuntu. They all have pretty good support forums and resources around the net, and automate and hide a lot of configuration and work that might confuse a beginner.

Ubuntu and SuSE will configure dual boot environments for you during the install process if you want them too, and Windows or some other OS is already installed. I believe Fedora Core does as well, but I haven't played with FC on a dual boot system.

The general recommended way to install Linux and Windows is to install Windows first, then the Linux distribution. This is because Windows XP (probably 2000, maybe Vista?) will blow away the MBR, which in turn means you have to reconfigure the system to dual boot.

I tried ubuntu for my nieces computer and it did not like me picking a non-english language (brazillian portuguese). I went back to fc6.

 

[Alias2]

Ubuntu, SuSE, and Fedora Core are all pretty nice - most people will probably tell you Ubuntu. They all have pretty good support forums and resources around the net, and automate and hide a lot of configuration and work that might confuse a beginner.

Ubuntu and SuSE will configure dual boot environments for you during the install process if you want them too, and Windows or some other OS is already installed. I believe Fedora Core does as well, but I haven't played with FC on a dual boot system.

The general recommended way to install Linux and Windows is to install Windows first, then the Linux distribution. This is because Windows XP (probably 2000, maybe Vista?) will blow away the MBR, which in turn means you have to reconfigure the system to dual boot.

Awesome, thats what I thought!

I tryed this a few years back, everything worked nice. But I couldn't access my NTFS partition. I have all my music, movies, and photos that I could not access.

I still have my Knoppix bootable CD to play with. One of these days I will figure out this Linux thing. I like Vista, but its not cutting it for me.

 

[bashPenguin]

Awesome, thats what I thought!

I tryed this a few years back, everything worked nice. But I couldn't access my NTFS partition. I have all my music, movies, and photos that I could not access.

I still have my Knoppix bootable CD to play with. One of these days I will figure out this Linux thing. I like Vista, but its not cutting it for me.

An NTFS driver has been in the Linux 2.6 kernel for the last 4-5 years at least. These days, most distributions will have this driver built into the kernel or as a module that you can load at runtime. I've been happily reading my NTFS partitions since the day I switched to 2.6-based kernels. For writing to NTFS though, there is still work to be done but there is a pretty good beta software, Linux NTFS3g, which is getting close to a full implementation of NTFS write support. Reading NTFS is perfectly safe with the built in driver.

I'm still sticking with XP and my various Linux and *BSDs.

 

[Empyrean]

Both can read FAT32, but if you want to avoid that (and you should) you can use FS-Share so that Windows can read/write to an EXT3 partition.