I'm looking for a new laptop and am curious if there's people have had much problems installing linux on a vista system. I'm asking since today when I was at a store the salesman said that vista needs a complete reinstall after repartitioning, and basically would be a big pain to get working. Based on what I've read it doesn't seem much different than dual booting with XP, but I wanted to know what other people have experienced before deciding this guy was didn't know what he was talking about.

Well seeing as most sales types are a bunch of unknowledgeable peons, I doubt that he'd have the faintest idea about linux (might be wrong of course). If you have a partitioning application that is supported by vista, then AFAIK theres no reason why you can't just make some "unallocated space" with it, and then just run an install disk for your chosen distro and use that to make the linux partition(s), formats etc etc.

Hell, what kind of recovery facility was offered with the laptop you were looking at anyway ?? Surely if it did, by some incredible chance, need that, then there must be some way of recovering a damaged system Q.E.D you could just install linux and then run the recovery, only thing you'd have to do would be to put the bootloader back as a recovery would overwrite the linux bootloader app with a windows bootloader.

Sounds like a load of horse sh1t to me!

regards

John

This seems to be the trickiest issue. From what I can tell, most standard partitioners that I have on my linux LiveCDs won't play nice with vista. I've come across lots of people saying they had no trouble getting a vista/linux dual boot, but almost all the guides I've managed to find are assuming people are installing vista onto a clean drive, and say to use the partitioner in the vista installation. The only reference to an already installed vista is here where it says there's a partitioner tool as part of vista.

The sales guy made it seem like the restore cds wouldn't work with a resized partition which sound suspicious to me, but that's where the big pain issue would come in.

However I'm starting to find some more posts now, which are making me think that even with the partitions vista isn't going to play nice with grub. Since I'm leaning towards buying this thinkpad which still is available with XP, I'm starting to think that might be a better option.

"The devil you know, or the devil you don't."

I vote for the XP machine, of the two choices.

I'd vote with GrapefruiTgirl - if you can still get one with XP then surely it's better to go with a "know quantity"? With what i'm reading at slashdot, theregister and other places, theres certainly no great stampede toward vista.

good luck with whatever you settle on.

regards

John

Yeah, get the one with XP.

I had no problems using gparted to repartition vista to multiboot. Vista didn't complain much. However, I also chose to install xp, which was a mistake. I am very glad that vista does not recognize ext2 partitions, because after about a month, vista decided that my xp partition needed fixing. It took over re-writing security id's for all my files on that partition and rendered it useless. I can access the files from vista, but can't do much else with it.