Want to install linux on dell laptop. will i have problems?

[piski]

I have a dell inspiron 8600 running xp home right now. I want to partition the HD and install linux on the partition. A) will i lose info if i partition? B) will i have problems? c) which linux should i use?

thanks
KD

 

[n0cmonkey]

http://www.musall.de/techdocs/linux/dell/i8600linux.html
http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~dgupta/articles/linux-dell-8600.html
http://www.koeniglich.de/dell_8600.html
http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~dgupta/articles/linux-dell-8600.html
http://www.users.fast.net/~eclectic/debian-8600.html
http://folk.uio.no/staalep/i8600/
http://jfboeuf.chez.tiscali.fr/dell/ (In French)

All of these were found using http://www.google.com/linux
http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/dell.html provided most of the links in the end.

Answers to lettered questions:
A) You can. You should have up to date backups anyways. If you use something like partition magic correctly, you shouldn't. But there are no guarentees that I am aware of. Backing up and partitioning, and restoring is probably the safest bet.
B) Maybe. Check the links above. Over all, I'd say it looks like a well supported laptop.
C) Check the stickied post at the top of the OS forum. It explains bits and pieces about a number of distributions. One of them may catch your eye.

 

[Venner]

I put Slackware (my favorite distro since '96) on my new Dell 5150 laptop, back before Christmas. I just used Partition Magic to shrink down my XP partition, then installed Slackware. The only problems I ran into were that (at the time) the driver for the Broadcom network card wasn't in the linux source yet and I had to find & compile it. I still don't know if there's a driver for the 802.11 card.

Overall though, everything runs well. The above guides n0cmonkey posted look good.

Now I've got an itch to try Gentoo... 🙂