Hello,

I've been using Ubuntu for I think about a year now- Honestly I forget when I first installed it- I started off with Ubuntu Hoary and now on Breezy. Obviously this is a pretty noob friendly distro, although there has been a steep learning curve at times even so.

When I first installed, like many I suppose, I put it on an old machine that already had windows installed. Needless to say Windows rarely saw the light of day after that. This was a K6-2 400 with a 2.5 Ghz Master HDD and a 10 Ghz Slave HDD to which I installed Ubuntu.

After I rebuilt my gamer I put the MoBo, CPU and RAM into the Linux machine after which Ubuntu would boot but Windows, surprise, would not, BSOD and reinstall didn't work either.

So after all that my question is can I install and dual boot another Linux distro by installing it on that Master HDD and if so how might I go about this so I don't get the dreaded Grub 16/17 error?

Could I use something like Damn Small or another lightweight distro since it's such a small hard drive? Any suggestions?

Thank you!

I'd like to recommend slack!

Anyway, yeah, you certainly can. Dual Booting 2 linux distros shouldn't really be an issue. Just install it, tell the boot loader which partition/device the new install is on, and you should be set. It's really pretty straight forward.

HTH

Cool

i'd second slack for that hardware, provided you're willing to sort through the packages manually during set up to install the ones you want. otherwise, with full install, it will take up most of your 2.5GB.

another way which i would also recommend is getting the debian net install base CD, and then installing what you want later with apt-get. that will be a bit easier (and more fun than going through the slack packages manually, in my experience ). either way, you'll end up with a speedy and rock solid system that has exactly what you want and no more.

Guess I should have mentioned that the old gamer hardware is what's running it now:

AMD XP 2400 CPU @ 2.0 Ghz, ECS K7S5A MoBo AND 512 MB PC2100 RAM.

Does that change your suggestions any? I had heard alot of good talk about Slackware when I first became interested in Linux so it might be a good learning experience for me anyhow.

What do you think? And thanks for the suggestions!

give slack a try. it's not nearly as difficult as many make it out to be, plus you have ubuntu experience behind you now, so you should adapt nicely you also know your hardware/box/etc...so slack would be a great choice.

If it weren't for using Slackware, I would have given up with Linux probably. I learned so much, but more importantly than that, it was blazing fast. Far far faster on that old hardware than FC4 is on my x86_64 hardware today! I'd go back, but the machine is for my wife and I, as well as guests, so FC4 is a little more along the lines of what I expect them to be able to muck around with. My servers and other workstations that are dedicated for something (like MythTV) all run Gentoo, which was a nice alternative to Slack once I learned all the essentials in slack.

Cool