What's the story on dual booting

The standard recomendation for dual-boot is still to install Windows first, then Linux. More modern "Dual Mode" installations run Linux and Windows concurrently.

Windows 95,98, and ME were notoriously hostile, wiping all of the parbreastioning and boot sector information from the drive during the installation process.

Windows NT (4.0, 2000, XP) tend to be a bit less agressive, because there may be Windows 9x-ME parbreastions which need to be read by the new NT installations.

Many people prefer to use Parbreastion Magic or another good parbreastion editor to resize existing NTFS and FAT32 parbreastions. Linux installations reccomend that aboot parbreastion be installed as one of the first parbreastions and that it be relatively small. GRUB or LILO can be installed in this lower parbreastion.

GRUB and newer versions of LILO can boot parbreastions located in almost any other part of the hard drive.

The newer strategy has been to run Linux concurrently with Windows.

To run Linux as a "Client" application on Windows, you can use VMWare or Microsoft Virtual PC and configure the virtual machine.for Linux to run on a virtual disk on the NTFS file system.

To run Windows as a "Client" application on Linux, you can use VMWare, Xen, or Bochs, and install Windows on a virtual machine.

The third alternative is to use WINE and-or Crossover on Linux. This is a great way to handle some of those Windows applications that don't need too much Windows "special programming".

Keep in mind that any of the reccomendations above require at least some form of OEM license for Linux. You don't have to run the version installed by the OEM, but even your downgrade requires a Windows license.

About 80% of all Linux workstations support some sort of Windows compatibility of this sort.