Best Distro 533

On Sat, 25 Feb 2006 12:08:51 -0800, chevysrock39

Try Fedora Core 4 or Ubuntu. With any Linux distribution you'll need several parbreastions, you should also make a spare parbreastion so that you can do a future upgrade without blowing away your current distribution. You can have as many different distros on a machine as you want, the only limit is the available disk space.

You have ParbreastionMagic and BootMagic so if I were you I'd use BootMagic as your primary bootloader. The reason for doing that is that you are only going to have one copy of Windows on your system but you might want to try several different Linux distributions so that you can find the one you like best.

To prepare your system with ParbreastionMagic you will need to do the following,

1) Shrink your NTFS parbreastion to create room for Linux unless you plan to put Linux on a different disk. If you are using one disk for everything you should do the following to make space for Linux, a) Run the disk optimizer to cleanup and pack the NTFS parbreastion. b) Use PM to shrink the NTFS parbreastion.

2) If you plan on using BootMagic then you will need a small FAT32 parbreastion. BootMagic is an antique that comes from OS2. It works fine but it requires a FAT32. Make the FAT32 parbreastion 50Mbytes.

3) Create your Linux parbreastions, you can do this with PM or with the installer from the first distribution you install, I'd recommend that you do it with the Linux installer.

Create the following parbreastions,

8G, this is where the OS goes

altos 8G, this is reserved for a second Linux distribution. Even if you don't put two on your system you should create this so that you can do a future upgrade without blowing away your current OS.

swap 2X the RAM size. 2X is a rule of thumb, you could choose another size but 2X your RAM is a good size.

home remaining space. This is where your user accounts go. It can be shared by all of the distributions that you are using. When you do a future upgrade you will format the new parbreastion but you won't touch thehome. If you are planning on using Linux a lot then make this big, if not you can make it 10G or so.

4) Install the distribution. When you get to the screen that installs the bootloader make sure that you install it in the root parbreastion and not in the MBR. On Fedora Core you have to select Advanced Options to do this, I don't know about Unbuntu (I don't use Ubuntu).

5) Boot into Windows and run the BootMagic configuration GUI and add the Linux distribution.

6) Reboot the machine and select the Linux distribution.

When you boot into Linux the first time the first thing that you should do is run the updater to get all of the patches. This is especially true of Fedora Core. The version that's on the install CDs is essentially a beta, once you've done the update you'll have a good solid system.