Looking for dual booting advice 2222

PaulFXH

Linux(?): For your use, I'd go with Ubuntu (https:--shipit.ubuntu.com

video shows XP Professional installation as well. If your HDD doesnt have any free space for Linux, just use gparted livecd or norton's parbreastion magic to create some free space for Linux. For your purpose, 10-15GB of free space should be good enough unless you decide to download-create huge amount of data, or install huge packages outside of Ubuntu CD.

I prefer installing Windows first and then Linux.

If you go other way round, Windows (installed 2nd) will wipe out the nice bootloader that Linux (installed 1st) installed. You will have to go through an additional step of re-installing the bootloader.

See if you can get some answers from these links

If you know what you are doing, installing to the MBR is okay too. MBR can be backed up:

When you install Fedora Core Linux, it will ask you where you want to install the bootloader - on the MBR or otherwise.

Every distribution has its own pros and cons. It is very difficult to find which one works the best for you other than installing and trying them. For home users, I recommend Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) and PCLinuxOS 0.92. I have heard some good reviews about Mandriva, SuSE, Mepis and are doing, gives reviews and a few more reads.

Install Firefox, OpenOffice and VLC media player on any distribution and you should be good to go. Ubuntu ships with FireFox and OpenOffice. Get VLC using website (and many others direct you how to get VLC).

I am expecting the top 10 distributions on distrowatch to recognize all your hardware just fine.

My home Dell Dimension 3000's hardware is detected fine by Knoppix, FC4, PCLinuxOS and Ubuntu. At work, I have mixed bag of successes but I dont care a lot at work if sound card isnt recognized since we dont need sound to get our things done anyway.

I replaced my FC4 with Ubuntu at home only for the reason that Ubuntu detected my wireless PCI out-of-the box and connected fine to the access points whereas ndiswrapper and 16k stack from Linuxant for FC4 were a headache at times, and again success was not consistent with ndiswrapper+FC4+16k stack kernels+wireless PCI.

Now, if you want to watch CNN videos, listen to smapoos.com, raaga.com etc., Linuxes might cause a bit of trouble. Again, there are pros-cons with all OSes. Overall, Linux is an excellent OS. Hope you have fun working on it. Good luck.