Topic: Dual boot new box suggestions desired.

[flipp]

Any suggestions on setting up a new system that will be used for audio and photo (no video) work?
I have legit W98SE, W2K and a couple of versions of Ubuntu available, 5.05 and 6.06. I would like to dual boot the system. It will not be used to connect to the internet but may occasionally be hooked into a home network.

I know there are some very knowledgeable Linux folks who post here. Suggestions as to which version of Ubuntu I should load or a different distribution? Any tips to which OS I should load first in order to avoid potential conflicts?  Tips on partioning/sizing the drive?

The box they're going on consists of a Sempron 3400+ w/ 1GB ram and a 250GB IDE hd. I may replace the IDE hd with a SATA HD in the near future, the same time I add a sound card to the box. I've gone into the BIOS and set the boot order as optical> floppy> hd. At the moment, the HD has not been formatted nor partitioned. Never having dual-booted a box before, any hints for a first-timer?

[kskreider]

I had a dual boot machine for a long time.  Audio editing was a stripped version of Win2K and everything else was running on WINXPSP1. 

If you are going to load on two Windws OS's MAKE SURE YOU LOAD THE OLDEST ONE ON FIRST.  Give yourself about 30-40GB for your OS's and program files.  Split the rest up into partitions for your projects.

[pigiron]

A quick search found tons of good info... for instance:

http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~mjmille2/howtos/dual-boot-linux-and-windows/
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/05/08/dual-boot-laptop.html

(although these are geared toward laptops, I see no reason they wouldn't apply in your case)

Most of the main tips are covered in those docs... install Windoze first because it doesn't play well with others... don't replace the Windoze MBR for the same reason  ...since reverse engineering the NTFS filesystem has been a tough nut to crack (and seems to be a moving target), use a different type of filesystem on any partition that you want to share between the two OS's (like FAT32).

The only thing I'll add is that you may want to consider first booting a LiveCD version of whatever flavor of Linux you decide on (if possible) http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/LiveCD/... this may flush out any hardware compatibility problems you may have (there's getting to be less and less of these though). ok... one more... most distributions install gobs and gobs of applications by default. Many that you may not be interested in. So I usually do a "custom" installation so that I can load just the apps that I want... you can always install any of the others later... but this manual process increases the installation time significantly.

As for post installation... besides all those pretty GUI applications that will show up in your distribution's version of the "Start" button, there's also a very huge and very rich set of command line executables that will be installed... and I use the hell out of them. The apropos and man commands are your friend here. Also, search the net for Linux compatibility before you purchase that sound card.

Last but not least... welcome to Linux

[BobW]

LILO is simple, but pure and works well
Win OS first, don't share files unless you really, really have to.
SuSE could see some (non-encrypted) NTFS content

Do not expect the isolation to protect the Linux side from Windoze virii, etc. it will not.
Those files are on the machine and will list and can be subject to malware.

I am looking into a Tiger / WinXP box, to be kept off-net for Audio and personal stuff.
Separate harddrives for each OS.

Current box is becoming a Torrent Seeder & FTP server

and an old lappy becomes my email, chat, & surf virus catcher... hmm, I migh run ubuntu on it, for kicks... SuSE seems to be going strictly commercial