Not a joke or trying to pull your leg with that 2nd question here:
I have two company laptops, one should run XP and NT (see the other similar post) and the other one XP and Linux, I will use the latter myself:
Both are of same hardware (Asus if it matters) and have Windows XP pre-installed, harddisk is however partioned already into 11 and 9 GByte where XP is resident on the bigger one.
Now I want to install Linux on the 2nd partition:
What Linux release do you recommend as I think there are quite a few around?
Is the installation possible without killing XP and all installed programs?
I remember from years ago that you need to install some boot manager for selecting which OS to start, but can’t remember if there are any requirements which OS must be installed first or what implications it has to an existing OS!?
I’ve used RedHat in the past (6.0, I think 8.0 came out yesterday!) and it suited my needs. In the interest of full disclosure, I left my linux and Win2000 boxes on a shelf back in the Seattle and only brought my iBook with OSX to Taiwan.
Since you already have XP installed, check out asia.cnet.com/itmanager/netadmin … 805,00.htm
for an example of installing RedHat 7.3. I imagine 8.0 would be similar. The distros tend to be pretty big downloads but if you decide to go with RedHat I seem to recall being able to pick it up at your local 7-11. Don’t know if it includes Chinese of English docs, but either way you’ve got the internet for help.
But I’d recommend Mandrake 9.0 because it’s targeted to the normal desktop user. Less post-install configurations to make. E.g It’ll auto mount your windows partition, on your first login, which is neat, and you don’t have to muck around with your fstab file or in linuxconf, as in Redhat.
The neat thing about Redhat is its new theme ‘Bluecurve’ and how KDE and GNOME have a consistent look. But you won’t miss anything.