linux installation questions

[rookie1010]

Hello

I wanted to take the linux plunge

i was thinking of installing it on a SATA drive and this would not be my primary or secondary master or slave. do you guys think this would be a problem?

i also wanted to have the ability to access all my files stored on my windows xp drive (word, pdf) from the linux prompt, is this possible?

what distribution of linux do you guys recommend?

 

[Nothinman]

i was thinking of installing it on a SATA drive and this would not be my primary or secondary master or slave. do you guys think this would be a problem?

Nope, especially considering that SATA doesn't have a master/slave nomenclature...

i also wanted to have the ability to access all my files stored on my windows xp drive (word, pdf) from the linux prompt, is this possible?

Sure, FAT support is pretty much universal and Linux can read NTFS just fine. Writing NTFS requires something like ntfs-3g but that's not too hard to install.

what distribution of linux do you guys recommend?

It's all personal opinion like Coke or Pepsi, personally I go for Debian but Ubuntu's a little easier to get started with these days.

 

[rookie1010]

thanks for the reply,

will go for ubuntu then

so can i have 2 drives, a cd rom drive and a dvd RW on the 4 (master-slave ) - (primary-secondary) combinations and a SATA drive having linux and have a prompt screen at boot up time prompting if i wanted to boot up in windows xp or in linux?

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Originally posted by: rookie1010
so can i have 2 drives, a cd rom drive and a dvd RW on the 4 (master-slave ) - (primary-secondary) combinations and a SATA drive having linux and have a prompt screen at boot up time prompting if i wanted to boot up in windows xp or in linux?

Yeah it'd be no problem. Ubuntu automatically installs Grub and Grub automatically detects any other partitions.

 

[Nothinman]

Yeah it'd be no problem. Ubuntu automatically installs Grub and Grub automatically detects any other partitions.

Grub doesn't automatically detect anything, that's all done by Ubuntu's installer.

 

[rookie1010]

thanks for the replies,

i will go get myself a SATA drive and install ubuntu.