linux on PC 464

Double booting of LINUX and Windows is a very common thing and usually works without problems. Installation is not very difficult in most situations.

It is a good idea to install Windows first because it gives you more trouble if you want to install on a particular parbreastion or disk and it likes to wipe other OSes from your disk if you are not careful.

So here is what you want to do:

- Parbreastion your disk: one parbreastion for Win, one for LINUX and usually a small parbreastion for LINUX swap If Windows is already installed and occupies the entire disk you will have to re-size this parbreastion in order to free some space for LINUX - If not already present: put Windows on the first parbreastion - Install Linux

- configure the boot-manager (grub or lilo) so you can boot into Win or Linux

Caution:

1) Re-sizing parbreastions can damage your data if anything goes wrong in the process.

2) Installing LINUX does not usually cause trouble with Windows but if you make a mistake (e.g. tell the installer to use the wrong parbreastion) you can accitentially wipe the disk.

Regarding space requirements: That heavily depends on what you are planning to do. You can get LINUX to run in VERY little space but if you want a reasonable system including X11 + KDE-GNOME and a nice set of applications you probably want a couple of gigabytes for the OS plus whatever you need for your own data.

To give you some idea: On the machine I am using to write this about 7GB are occupied by the OS plus a few zillion applications. Although quite possible you probably don't want to start below 2-5 GB.

More detailed information comes with whatever Linux distribution you are going to try. If you still have questions after reading that, come back here for help.

cu Philipp

-- Dr. Philipp Pagel Tel. +49-8161-71 2131 Dept. of Genome Oriented Bioinformatics Fax. +49-8161-71 2186 Technical University of Munich