Should I Try This....

[JenniferX]

First off, this is my first post, so HELLO everyone.
Second off, I know I am a woman, but I really do know something about computers.

Here's my scenario. I've got 3 PC's networked together thru a T100 switch. All of them have XP Pro on them and it works great. I am using static IP's on all of them. I have an ADSL connection on one (USB connection from modem to the computer) and it is the gateway for the other computers. This setup works great and I have had no problems with the other computers getting online thru the LAN.

Here's what I want to do. One of the computers doesn't get used much, except for the occasional "Let's play a Yahoo game during family time." I would like to put Linux on this computer. I did have a Red Hat distro on it awhile back but took it off. This system is a P3/600 with around 196MB of ram, nothing real great, just a system I picked up that was on sale at a local shop. I would like to put XP and Linux on this system. I know 10Gb isn't that much, but there would be but about 2-3 apps installed on the XP side. This is kinda a tinker around in Linux deal since I didn't have the time to play with it when Red Hat was on it. Maybe you get the idea of what I want to do, so here are some questions.

1) Should I even attempt to do this?
2) What kind of partition scheme should I use? (if you were attempting this)
3) Which OS should go first? (I know LILO likes to write it's own bootloader)
4) Any predictable errors with sharing the ADSL connection?
5) What do you suggest besides Red Hat distro, I kinda didn't like it before.

 

[Need4Speed]

Check here

 

[CTho9305]

a link that actually works

I personally would recommend you use lilo. If you use win2k's bootloader, every time you update your linux kernel, you not only have to run lilo, but also edit that file (which you created using dd).

1. always worth a try
2. I would give XP 3 gig... 1.5 for xp, 1.5 for apps/data. linux root 6.5, linux swap 500MB. unless you're setting up a serious system, there isn't really any benefit to having the different linux directories on separate partitions.
3. XP first. xp unfortunately pulls a win98 and dumps the NTLOADER on, overwriting LILO.
4. nope, shoudl work fine. configure it with the same settings you use on the other machines
5. any reason you didn't like redhat? i would recommend redhat, or basically anything but mandrake.

 

[AkumaBao]

I would split the drive almost in half. 6gig for Linux, and 4gig for XP. Always do Windows first. If it see's Linux anywhere it will not install.

My $0.02

 

[JenniferX]

Thank you all for the input and link.

CTho9305: The reason I really didn't like Red Hat. Well this might seem silly.... It installed fine and autodetected a bunch of stuff (built in LAN adapter, onboard Vid/Sound) and I really liked Knome and KDE. Of course I had to rebuilt the Kernel to get my Lucent WinModem to work, but wasn't a big deal since I was sharing a connection and didn't use it at all. I even set up Samba and used it to link to another Winbox. So I think I have went through the Linux newbie stuff somewhat.

My problem with it was this. 9 different ways to do something (application wise). This might be true with all distro's of Linux, but it seems like when you look up how to do something in Red Hat, there are always 10 ways of doing it and with 10 different approaches (applications, .ini files, etc). I went back and just used KDE without Gnome and it was the same. Like a Linux set of apps and then the KDE set of apps. I know it's suppose to be like this, but I didn't know if it was like this on every distro of Linux.

Know what I mean? I could use Red Hat, but wanted to see if there was something that was different, but I am guessing not.

 

[n0cmonkey]

If you dont want 10 different ways to do something, dont go with a UNIX-compatible system. Variety is the spice of life.