I use Mandrake 8.1 and have a Dell LatitudeC510. How do I find
out if I well have any problems ?? Will be a dual boot with WinXP.
Also is there a way to play DVD's in Linux?? Have a external player
PC card.
Thanks for your help and time
MrT

The first, and hopefully only, problem is that of space. Do you have any unused space on your hard drive? By that I mean is there unused and unformmated space on the hard drive. If not, then you will need a program to re-size your Windoze space and shrink it down so that you can allocate enough space for the Linux filesystems. If you can beg/borrow/buy a copy of Partition Magic (ver. 8?), that may be the best way to resize Windoze, but do not use it to allocate/format Linux space. Just leave the space unallocated, the installer on your Linux distro will find the space and take care of it. You may also want to do some searches here in LQ on the shubjetc of shrinking or re-sizing NTFS partitions.

The second problem will likely be compatability of some hardware components with Linux. This is especially true of winmodems as there are a few (but growing) number of Linux drivers for that wierd device. I'm not familiar with the specs and components on that Dell model, maybe a list of drives attachments, builtins, etc. might prove useful.

"How do I find out if I well have any problems ??"

I am not sure how you can find out if you will have any problems without actually installing it first - except of course if you try a distro that has a live evaluation like SuSE 8.1 (that you can download).

I tried about 10 distros on my notebook and had problems with most of the 'smaller ' distros - like SCO, Connectiva, Vector, Corel, Darwin, etc. Couldn't get past the installation stage because hardware was not supported. I left WinXP on my system during three months of testing and trialling and never lost the NTFS partition or the ability to boot up WinXP.

With Mandrake 9.0, RedHat 8.0, SuSE 8.1 you shouldn't have too many problems except of course your winmodem. A winmodem to a linmodem is an easy conversion. Just download the CORRECT driver from www.heby.de/linmodem.