Author: Allen Lake
Date: 11:13:50 05/30/02
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Personally, I'd recommend using Mandrake (whether you download it or buy it from www.cheapbytes.com), but for a somewhat unusual reason. As James Swafford mentioned below, setting up the disk partitioning scheme for a dual boot system can be tricky for the first time user. Mandrake has what they call their "Lnx4Win" installation. Basically, a Mandrake filesystem is created inside an disk-image file on your Windows partition, and a Mandrake/Lnx4Win icon is created on your Windows desktop, so that you can start up Linux from Windows. I think it also creates a GRUB start up menu while your machine is booting, allowing you to choose either Windows or Linux at boot time, but don't hold me absolutely to this. At any rate, this Lnx4Win setup is probably a lot easier (and safer) for the first-time Linux installer than the typical Linux setup. Once you've gotten more comfortable with Linux and learned a few of its quirks, then you can go back and set up a true dual-boot system. Additionally, if you decide you don't like Mandrake, I think they provide a Windows uninstaller which will remove Mandrake from your system. Before any of the Linux purists get their flamethrowers warmed up, let me give you the downside of Lnx4Win -- performance. Since it's running on top of the Windows filesystem, Lnx4Win suffers a performance hit any time you need to access the hard drive. I don't know any statistics on how big this performance hit is, but be aware that it is there. If you've got a reasonably new machine (1 GHz processor or better) and reasonable RAM (256 MB or higher), this performance hit may not even be perceptible to you. I noticed a slight performance hit on my K6 333 MHz (32 MB RAM) laptop, but I was willing to put up with it for the convenience of not having to repartition the hard drive. There may be other performance hits as well (related to the use of the loop device), but, as I've said, I didn't find them particularly annoying. I actually did a normal RedHat install on that same laptop and the RedHat performance appeared to have similar performance -- not enough to be significantly different to me -- so I nuked RedHat and went back to the Lnx4Win installation. One good thing about the performance hit, though -- if you run engine-vs-engine matches in XBoard, both sides will suffer the same performance hits, so you probably come out even in the end You can find some more information about Lnx4Win at http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/lnx4win.php3 If you don't have a local Linux guru to help you do a dual-boot box the right way, then Lnx4Win is a simpler way to get started with Linux. Once you've decided that Linux is worth your time and trouble, you can put together your Linux box from the ground up. Hope this helps, Allen
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