I'm looking to switch from a single boot XP system to dual boot with some flavor of linux, but I have a few issues.

I'm not quite sure which distro to use. I'm fairly unexperienced with Linux, but I've played around with Knoppix so I was thinking of going that route. Is there a better starting distro?

Also, all of my drives are formatted to NTFS. I've heard partition magic can convert a drive back to fat32, but it seems perilous at best. How do you guys deal with NTFS? by avoiding it?

9/24/2006 11:16:40 PM

I recommend Ubuntu, its pretty straight-forward and easy to use.

Linux has the ability to read from NTFS, but write support is not very stable.

9/24/2006 11:25:08 PM

you can get read access for ntfs with linux pretty easily. Writing to ntfs drives is not so easy and not really suggested. Leave your windows partition as is. Switching to fat32 is the best solution. partition magic can do it for you and it is really easy. takes all of 10 minutes. if you don't have a copy you can also use gparted livecd. it'll do the same things as P.M. and its free. This way you'll be able to have read/write support for the drive with windows and linux.

9/24/2006 11:29:34 PM

The easiest solution is to have an additional fat32 partition where you store your personal data/music so both windows and linux can read from it. Also I'd recommend ubuntu.

9/25/2006 12:30:30 AM

Linux + NTFS is a failure.

Reformat in Fat32.

9/25/2006 1:51:50 AM

This really depends on how many hard drives you have as to how you are going to pull this off. If you want to mess around with resizing your partitions, you can use Partition Magic, or download GParted LiveCD. If you have more than one hard drive, put Linux on the non-Windows hard drive. Minor chance of something happening, but it still could happen, then you are SOL.

If you are more of a Windows person, my recommendation would be to look into modifying the boot.ini file to setup your dual boot. Will take a small amount of work/research, but if you want to get rid of Linux, it doesn't permanently mess up your system.

9/25/2006 7:22:08 AM

I really don't want to create a new thread just for this question so I might as well ask it here.

What is the best distro of linux with a decent UI for a P3 256MB ram computer? The last several distros I used were just as much a resource hog as Windows.

9/25/2006 11:59:31 AM

It's not that they are resource hogs (at least, the *nix distros), its just that you expect an older machine to do GUI intensive stuff most likely.

9/25/2006 12:18:14 PM

I really don't need a graphics heavy GUI - not text based either though. Will Fedora core 5 do well for me?

9/25/2006 12:34:00 PM

^I ran core 5 on a P3 1GHz fine.

9/25/2006 3:12:35 PM

I have a box with twin P3 667 mhz, 512 ram
primarily using ubuntu dapper, but I also installed Fedora 5 and it runs fine (I've never been happy with Fedora's repos. I can run "yum install update" 5x in a row and get different packages depending on which mirror it chooses. Ubuntu seems much better about this)

also, unlike windows which will allocate more if you need it, linux has you choose a set amount of swap space for when your ram is not enough. make sure you create enough. my computer stalls and has to be reset if I'm not careful and let both swap and ram fill up (512 ram, 400 swap)

its not really so much the distro thats a resource hog, but whether you choose KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Fluxbox etc. as your windows manager..
Gnome tends to run a little higher than the others as far as resource usage, XFCE and Fluxbox much less so, KDE being inbetween
I like Gnome the best overall, and it runs fine on my box

9/25/2006 3:41:42 PM

Quote :

"also, unlike windows which will allocate more if you need it"

9/26/2006 10:46:33 AM

Quote :

"I really don't need a graphics heavy GUI - not text based either though. Will Fedora core 5 do well for me?"

Ubuntu + fluxbox. Its not much to look at, but it does everything you'd need it to. I personally like it a lot more than Gnome/KDE, even on a machine that could easily run a nicer looking GUI.

9/26/2006 4:15:57 PM

^^ I think windows automatically allocated about 10 gigs of pagefile on my laptop
by default its system managed, but ofcourse you can tweak it. though, it is easier to give windows more pagefile than expand the linux swap partition

^ I prefer XFCE over Fluxbox, just personal preference. xfce seems to have more add-ons if you want them. both are light on resources, both are in the ubuntu repos (thus easy to install)

note that if you install ubuntu it comes with gnome and only gnome. xubuntu (http://www.xubuntu.org/) is ubuntu with the xfce desktop. kubuntu is KDE. Fedora Core 5 comes with Gnome and KDE, you decide on install which you want (or both). after the base install you can decide if you would prefer using another manager like fluxbox or xfce, which are easily installed using Synaptic / apt-get [ubuntu] or yum [fedora].

[Edited on September 26, 2006 at 6:13 PM. Reason : note]

9/26/2006 6:01:09 PM

I've never tried XFCE, I might apt-get it and try it out. I just really like fluxbox's functionality. XGL/Compiz is such a waste. I tried it out for a while, jiggly windows does not equal improved functionality.

9/26/2006 6:15:29 PM

stumbled across this today. seemed somewhat related.

Quote :

"Bill Clinton told the Labour conference to get into ubuntu. Eh?"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5388182.stm

9/28/2006 1:26:05 PM