I want to install linux in my machine which is already having Windows XP Professional. Will it have any problem with Dual Booting?? If not pls help me in doing that. :(

No problem at all.What distro are you installing? All the newest Linux distro's will partiton and install the boot loader for you.

I did'nt tried anything. Can u pls suggest something for me???

Mandrake or Fedora for beginners. I'm not a beginner anymore and I still use Mandrake.
Stay away from Slackware and Gentoo.These two are NOT beginner friendly.

You might want to look at Knoppix.It runs off a "LiveCD".No install necessary.Burn it to disk,reboot.When you're done with it remove the cd and reboot back to Windows.Nothing on the Hard Drive is touched.

Visit LinuxIso.org to download iso images you can burn to disk.

stay away from redhat as a desktop... they disable mp3 support globally be default and it requires you edit a few files.

also it is not support for cd burning out of the box ether. requires scsi emulation and a couple of new modules at least for redhat9 and Pro worstation...

debian is nice but hard to install. once installed its pretty solid.

Mandrake 10.1 is pretty straight forward and has a nice install. The best luck I had was using partition magic to resize my master drive and left the unpartitioned as empty. Mandrake picked the empty space and installed really well plus I got to pick the space it would take. Libranet is another. Give Linux a shot it's free and it works.
Richie Mandrake 10.1

Don't mind if I do, guys. Seems like there's no time like now.

http://linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=29

i586
Download ISO Image Mandrake - CD 1 700MB MD5SUM
Download ISO Image Mandrake - CD 2 650MB MD5SUM
Download ISO Image Mandrake - CD 3 650MB MD5SUM
Released: 2004-09-04

Dialup downloading these will be a stretch though.

I've been looking to install *nix on my machine too. My XP recently &^@#%$ed up, so i was running Knoppix of a boot-disc to save all my files before i reformated the HD to clear the problem. I grew to LOVE the simplicity and style of Linux. Unfortunately, my mom complains whenever something new happens to the computer.

I'm interested in installing a Dual-boot system, but i have some questions:

How quick is it to switch from XP to Linux? My mom gets on a lot, but i'm the primary user. Don't want to annoy her everytime i need to switch to XP for her to do school-work.

How much space is taken up on the hard-drive from a dual-boot system?

If you restart the computer, does it give you a choice to boot one O/S over the other, do you set one as default, or does it automatically go to one O/S without prompting?

Thanx in advance for the help.

How fast does your computer reboot?


My Mandrake system takes up about 5 gig, but i have a lot of programs and useless stuff you won't have.



Mine is set to default to Linux with a timer to choose windows if i need to. This can be changed to default to windows and the timer length can be changed.
lilo.conf will be the file to edit after Linux is installed to make those changes.

Bah, Slackware was my second Linux distro ever (and my current one for the last year-ish).. it's not that hard.