Dual booting.

anonywho

I decided I wanna dual boot with Linux, but I can't decide on a version, so far I'm thinking Ubuntu, SUSE, or Red Hat, in order from most to least favorite.

What do you guys think from your experiences?

Uncle Long

Ubuntu is great, I say you do it. The installation process is relatively painless but you might want to look into a few of the forums on the Ubuntu page to get the finer points of dual booting.

Also, make sure your hardware is compatible and supported; nothing kills a foray into linux like the wireless on your laptop being incompatible and there being no work around (though this is becoming a rare case these days).

anonywho

How would I check if my hardware is all compatible?

Uncle Long

Well, what are you running? It's more than likely fine if you've got "standard Dell," or something. It's just when you get into the higher end stuff (someone is going to tell me I am wrong here) or the niche stuff that you're going to run into the most problems.

For instance: When I put this on my mother's computer when I knew I was moving across the country and I wouldn't be able to fix her computer when it was bogged down because she surfs like an idiot and clicks on just about any pop-up ad, everything worked really well, save for the wireless card. My solution was to get "generic linksys" card because I knew it would be supported. It was.

So, your stuff is more than likely supported. You can always run the live CD to find out if this isn't the case. If you boot from the CD and everything works then you're good. If it doesn't then you have to either look for a work around or try another flavor.

anonywho

I'm on XP pro,
the 2 things I'm worried about are my graphics card (7600 GT), and my wireless card which is some generic $3 thing. Well I started downloading Ubuntu now so it should be done overnight.

Uncle Long

Well, if it's generic then you will probably have an easy enough time with it.

Also, make sure you back up anything you wouldn't want to lose. People have a tendency to erase their windows partition the first time they try to install windows (people being me, I did this).

And it's just kind of a handy thing to do for whatever reason.

anonywho

wait wait you mean try to install Linux?

Uncle Long

yeah, my bad. You have to have a clear partition to install a second operating system.

I just...yeah, I don't know.

Yes, I meant Linux there, not Windows.

Silvoculous

Debian/Ubuntu and Mandriva/PCLinuxOS all have really simple, intuitive installation processes; I've dual-booted using these without a hitch. SUSE's partitioner is kinda confusing for me.

Nibble

Some wireless cards require proprietary firmware that has to be (automatically) downloaded from the internet after you install Ubuntu. Make sure that you have a wired connection to the internet, just in case.

DrFrylock

Ubuntu is great. If you're curious about outtathebox compatibility download a LiveCD and see what happens when you boot up. If that doesn't work right away though there is probably something you can do, so don't get discouraged if it's not 100% perfect.

Cyvros

I'd recommend Ubuntu as well - the latest version, Gutsy, has a restricted drivers manager which makes using wi-fi and video card so much easier.

Of course, there are also Ubuntu-based distros. There's a new one, gOS, that sounds very good as a starter Linux.

Apart from this, there's Fedora, the community side of Red Hat - never personally used it, but I've gotten great recommendations for it.

saggio

Stay with Debian-based linux distros. You will soon learn to love apt (no dependency hell!).

If you are running hardware that has been released in the last 6 months, you may want to look at the manufacturer's website to see if they list it as Linux compatible. It's usually not hardware that's the issue, but rather the manufactuerers not co-operating with the devs and linux driver writers. Because of that, there may be a lag time, especially if the hardware you are using is from a developer that is known to be a douchebag with regards to driver support.

If you have an nVidia card, you'll be able to use their own proprietary driver that allows 3d acceleration. I think Ubuntu will even install it for you without too much issue. If you have an ATi card, it also has a proprietary driver (fglrx) that allows 3d acceleration, but it has been traditionally a bit of a bitch to get working. That may have changed that in the latest version of Ubuntu (I don't know, I'm running Debian Lenny on my main box now), but just recently AMD, the new owners of ATi started to release all the specs and documentation for their latest chipsets (which should lead to new open source drivers).

Finally, you are going to want to be made aware of partitioning and what a good partition table should look like. Ubuntu will, by default, give you one giant partition and stick everything in there. That's not very good practise at all. In fact, that's probably the worst thing as far as partitioning goes. You are going to want at least 2 different partitions (not including swap) root (/), and home (/home). In my Debian installation, I have different partitions for /usr, /var, and /boot as well. Why so many? Well, simply, if one gets corrupted, or if part of my disk fails, I'm able to reinstall without losing data on the non-affected partitions. Also, by having /boot as separate partition, I can format it to a non-journalling file system, which increases boot time.

How large is your disk, and how much free space are you willing to dedicate to Linux? That'll be the biggest factor that influences your partition table.