Last year i bought an Hp laptop with xp installed on it. so I have gotten used to using windows,till the disaster vista came along and left me no choice but to upgrade. vista is slow i have no support from hp or windows either , long story short ..i am a newbee but i have fair idea of unix

THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO on my laptop which has a 160 GB hard drive
1. XP pro sp2 (50 gb )as i need these
2. switching from windows to unix will be a complicated task
3. I hear kde is a good choice but i want to eventually get rid of windows
4. Can some one guide me with a step by step procedure to install
Ubuntu 9.04, mandrake spring 2009, Fedora 10 , Open suse ,Kubuntu 4.0,Opensolaris with Xp(as default) ? I have my reasons to install all these distros . I did some trial and error and played with trying to install mandrake ,ubuntu but i am stuck NOW.
when i boot my laptop only windows and ubuntu is displayed on screen
i have made a partition of 5 gb swap as i read it from one of the forums ?
I am ready to start from scratch as long as xp is default os and the timer ticks only for 10 seconds
Any help from you seniors will be appreciated. I am hoping that I will get this done by the end of a long weekend .
you can email me too at rickyrock_3@yahoo.com

rickyrock_3,

First a gentle rebuke for labeling your post as Urgent. Everyone here gives their free time to help others and to the helpers all posts are equally urgent.

To put all those distros on you need to some planning before you do any more than install Windows or you will get into a mess. What will you use Linux for ?
That determines the size of the partitions you need. Will you try to use a common /home?
That can be a bad idea as different distros install different versions of software and the settings may be incompatible.

5G is huge for swap unless you intend to use Hibernate to swap, in that case a swap a little larger than yuor RAM is a safe size.

None of your installs will be standard. I reccomend you make the following partitions, /boot, maybe a shared /home, then one partition each for your distros. As you are allowed at most, four primary partitions, you will have something like the following
Xp sda1
/boot sda2 (shared)
/home sda3 (if you have one)
extended partition sda4 (rest of disk)
/ for first distro sda5
/ rinse and repeat.sda6... and so on.

Pick an install and read the instructions. Get your first install in and dual booting.
That will give you an insight into how its done.

You will install grub once and use it to boot all your distros and windows.
You will mount /boot on each distro, it will contain all your kernels.

Setting the timeout to 10 seconds is the least of your problems.

NeddySeagoon said it, and I repeat, it's not urgent. If this is urgent, then all the threads in LQ are urgent.

Well, you chose to upgrade. No one forces you. You could have continued to use XP alone.

I have no idea what do you mean with that sentence. KDE is just one of the available desktop environment for linux, there are many more. You can use KDE in any (well, almost) distro.

It has nothing to do with Windows in any case, whether you want to use Windows or ditch it is irrelevant to the fact that you use KDE or any other thing.

Download the iso files, burn them to a cd or dvd depending on the case, boot them, and follow the instructions. Install windows the first, since the Windows installer will assume that Windows is the only OS you need and will not give you the chance to boot any other thing.

But...

Why do you really want to install all of these? Live CDs exist for a reason... You will need some degree of Linux experience and some basic understanding on how it handles devices, partitions and boot loaders to be able to configure all of these OSes. It's not complicated once you have a basic understanding, but for a starter, it's way easier to just have Windows and one linux distro. Then you can add as much as you want once you know how to configure them.

I doubt anyone here is going to guide you though the installation of a dozen OSes step by step just because you want to install them for we-don't-know-what-purpose. I suggest using live cds, try some distros and choose one. Install windows first, then install that distro, and be happy.

If you want to give further testing, you can then use vmware or virtualbox inside that distribution to run other distros in virtual machines.

This depends on your boot loader. Most distros today will use grub, which stores it's configuration on /boot/grub/grub.conf, there you can change the timeout and the default entry to boot if none is selected.

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!

'NeddySeagoon' & 'i92guboj' have given you some good advice. I would add that this question or request has been presented here at LQ many times. Do a search here on LQ.

If you look at 'The LiveCD List' to get a LiveCD to test drive as many as you wish.

If you are wanting to load that many distributions then search for 'saikee' here on LQ or look at a saikee post(on another site).

These links and others can be found at 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!

Edit: take a look ath this thread; http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...79#post2622079

Please accept my apology , when your are on hold for twenty minutes just to hear "Linux is not supported" by HP, That was partially the reason to mark it as urgent. i am internet savvy but i don't even know how to thank you,

Well i didn't quiet anticipate any response for another 24 hours

Kindly show me how to thank you

Stick around and help others...

Welcome to LQ!!

Don't worry, no harm done. I usually answer this way always when responding to threads marked as "urgent" as an advice, because a lot of people (including myself) usually skip threads titled that way.

So, I advice you not to use that title in the future, because you might get less support that way. It's better to get warned once than ignored a thousand times

Just like when talking with another person in the street or at work, a simple "thank you" is more than enough. We are all users. I help people around here, but I also ask for help from time to time. I help here because I like to, no one forces me to do so and I expect nothing else in exchange. By the way, welcome to LQ and to Linux in general.

Hi Ricky,
I'll add my word of welcome to the others. I also agree with the most important ways of thanking other users for their time,patience and understanding. If, however, one particular post was of great use to you and you would like to acknowledge that fact then click on the thumbs-up icon located along the bottom of the post or posts you found useful. This is actually helpful because it is not always obvious what specific advice helped the user and led to solving the problem. What is obvious to some of us is not always obvious to all so I (at least) find the info useful.
Cheers and have fun,
jdk

i92guboj++