best distro for dual-boot XP Laptop
 

I have a Dell Inspiron 600m with the Intel 2200BG wireless card. I want to put a linux distro beside my XP for two reasons: 1) to learn linux, and 2) so I can get to my data the next time Windows refuses to boot. I have successfully put Mandrake 10.1 on a different laptop, and really liked the way it looked and was very useable. I decided to go with Mandriva 2005LE on my Dell, because I heard it worked well with the wireless card I had, and I knew I liked the feel and ease of dual boot installation of Mandrake. However, after a week of trying to get my wireless card working, I'm willing to try a new distro that I may have a better chance of getting the wireless working 'out of the box'. Its just too frustrating to have to boot into windows to find information, then boot back to MDK to try out something, then boot back into windows to look again when things don't work. I will never learn linux at this rate. So I need a distro that can do 2 things: 1) intall as easily as Mandrake so that I can use XP for work without (too much) risk of having a non-functional computer, and 2) give me a good chance of having my wireless work without too much tweaking after the install. Any recommendations?

There is a Linux driver and there is plenty of information about it at http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/

It is possible that it will all magically work out of the box if you use distro X but I doubt it. Maybe someone with the same hardware as you can help there.

I don't think that there is going to be an easy anwser - you are going to have to roll up your sleeves, read the guides at SourceForge, fiddle around and, if after having jumped through those hoops ask the guys on the list at http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/l.../ipw2100-devel for help.

The other option is to take it along to your nearest Linux User Group. They seem to be a bit scarce in Wyoming but you could ask at http://www.lwfug.org/

Sorry if that was not what you wanted to hear.

How about Ubuntu?
 

After some investigation, Ubuntu sounded like another user friendly version for Windows converts. I just tried the Live version of Ubuntu, and nearly fell in love. I couldn't get the wireless working in the first 10 minutes of playing around, but at least everything was found and could be configured after boot up. So has anyone had any luck with a Dell Laptop, or Intel 2200 Wireless card with Ubuntu? Also, any comments on how easy Ubuntu is to set up a dual-boot system with XP would be appreciated... I've heard that this distro may not play nice with Windows.

I use Ubuntu on my Presario 2700 laptop and it is brilliant. For the first time I seem to have full ACPI functionality out of the box with battery monitor, standby and hibernation. The The Orinoco 11b wifi with a Proxim chip was properly identified and drivers installed. It found the DHCP server on first boot. The computer dual boots with Windows XP with no problems

Installing any dual boot with any operating systems takes a bit of care. It is not hard to bork your system. There are plenty of guides around. My tactic is to install Windows first and to leave or create unused disk space for the Linux OS. Partition Magic is very good at resizing and moving Windows partitions.

When installing Linux if you are not totally sure of what you are doing allow the installer to take all free disk space and decide on the partitions needed. Then I use grub as the boot loader and take the option to install it on the mbr. Nothing in life is guaranteed so make sure that you have done your windows backups before you start.

I have not heard of any issues particular to Ubuntu and Windows. If you can be more specific about the potential problems it would help.

Your wifi will be a problem; it is a typical Linux dilemma with hardware not (properly) supported in Linux. Intel are not the worst but often manufacturers refuse to give information about their hardware to people who will publish the resulting drivers as free software. There are loads of problems with 11g drivers. My solution was to buy a very cheap 11b PCMCIA card which works perfectly (as do most 11b cards but check which chip they use before buying). It is unlikely that other distros will be any different.

If you do not like that I have told you where your drivers are and where to get support. It will probably not be easy but will be an excellent learning exercise.

i'm ok with Ubuntu. It's really very simple for user as same as Windows.

Yeah partition magic is great i use boot magic as well, which requires a fat 32 partition,I found it handy as if your have a large fat32, you can use It as an in between for linux and windows as both can read and write to fat32.On my laptop I haw 10Gb XP,1.7GB fat32, rest linux.
Mach_ie

i've had to go back to dual booting:( this is how i did it on a HP Pavillion Laptop.

1) Installed Windoz XP {left it minimum, i.e no updated programs etc}
2) Installed Partition Magic
3)Made the windoz partition to 10gb
4)Made a 2 gig fat32 partition {shared access}.
5)Installed Debian sarge onto free space. (Grub automatically recognised windoz partition).
6)When happy it worked, added updates and programs to windoz.

Everything works in Debian except ACPI, but I have only be using it for a day, so thats this weekends task.

Ubuntu installation
 

That sounds promising... I would be happy to buy a cheap 11b pc card if it would get wifi working so that i could find answers online while in Linux, rather than having to reboot twice before I can even try something new.

As for the dual-boot setup... here's what I did with both mandrake 10.1 and mandriva 10.2: When I installed windows, I created 2 NTFS partitions 12 gig for XP and applications, and 20 gig for data files (i use a lot of 7MP digital photos for work and play). I left the remaining space (about 4.7 gigs) for a linux install. when I installed Mandrake and Mandriva, i had it install to the free space, allow it to make the necessary partitions and choose the sizes, and put LILO on the mbr. Since mandriva is already on the drive, how should I best go about installing ubuntu? would it be best to delete the partitions in XP with drive management, then follow a similar routine when intalling ubuntu? Would this cause problems with the bootloader (since ubuntu uses GRUB)? And does ubuntu installation work in a similar fashion by automatically choosing the best size for its partitions?

I truly appreciate everyone's help and suggestions.

I have been through the dual boot nightmare and it is a real pain having to go into th other system every time you need to go online. You will not spend enough time in Linux to learn how to use it until the network problem is solved. http://prism54.org/supported_cards.php and http://questier.com/howto.html might help.

Ubuntu will quite happily deal with your Mandriva partitions. If you are happy with your partitions (and they look fine) just tell the Ubuntu intaller to re-use those partitions. Alternatively tell Ubunu to delete them and then create the partitions it prefers. Just make very sure that you delete/re-use Ext or Reiser partitions and not NTFS. This is where installations can turn into disasters.

As someone has already pointed out Linux is not good at writing to NTFS file systems. If you want to use any data in both systems it is a very good idea to create a FAT32 partition. Maybe you should convert or resize your data partition.

You can safely use Lilo or Grub but Grub is reckoned to be the better boot loader by many who know more about it than I. Just select grub and the installer will take care of the details. It is really very clever!

Thanks for the thanks. I have received much help on LinuxQuestions and try to pay the debt by passing on the knowledge. The best way to show your gratitude is to answer at least as many questions as you ask.

If you like Ubuntu, Mepis is also a good try. I think that for many that have tried both it's a toss up between the two. It comes down to whether you prefer an OS designed for KDE (Mepis) or designed for Gnome (Ubuntu) and whether you enjoy a slightly better out of the box experience (Mepis comes with Nvidia official drivers, Adobe Reader, I think even flash player, and some other free but not FREE in the Linux sense of the word applications pre-installed that Ubuntu doesn't have.) or a better community experience (Ubuntu has an amazing community and very good online documentation and help. It also may have much more staying power as a company and an OS in the long run.) If you're in the mood for trying things though, that's a good one to check out as well.

It looks like no matter what you're going to have to do something to get wireless working. I had a relatively easy experience (I have a prism chipset and Mandriva has that driver pre-installed), but I still had to do a google search and read through a good 20 sites or so to find where to download my firmware and exactly which folder to put it in (the driver is open source, but the firmware is almost always proprietary, so it is very unlikely that it will come pre-packaged with the distro).