I have been trying out Red Hat and Slackware with a view to replacing Win98 rather than upgrade to XP. I settled on Slack as the easiest to make customised installs.

Since I only have one Linux box I have done most of the downloads on Win98, and decided it would be usefull to be able to make the CD's from the downloaded packages rather than from the ISO. That way I can make a selective install - select the packages you want, and then edit the tagfile for each package folder.

This page had instructions for doing exactly what I wanted - openbsddiary.org/makeiso.html - and as an unexpected side effect, the directory from which the ISO is made provides all the files needed for doing an install from a hard drive.

Just make the boot and root disks as per the instructions in the bootdisk & rootdisk directories, then when you get the install menu select "install from hard drive ..." and the dialogue asks you for the partition (mine was /dev/hdb7) and the path. Worked a treat!

When I got to configuring LILO I let it put the MBR in the / partition, and gave it a 10 sec delay before booting Linux. Then I set BootMagic to boot Linux by default with a 10 sec delay so I can get to Win98. This all works fine, with enough delays so I can preempt the defaults.

I have 2 physical drives, with Win 98 in the 1st partion on the 1st drive, and the Linux / partition as the Primary partition of 2nd drive. I use PartionMagic to partition my drives, and BootMagic as a boot manager. The main / partion is 5Gb, with a 350Mb partition for the Swap space, and 3.2Gb for /home. I did try having /usr in it's own partition but had some odd problems with applications not starting. This current configuration seems to be quite stable. In addition I have a /install partion for downloads, so I can uninstall and re-install stuff easily.

Since most of my work is designing and managing websites, I do quite a lot of image manipulation in PhotoShop, which fot the time being I will keep in Win98, though I intend to use it to try out WINE. I will keep Win98 even after I have mastered GIMP, so that I can test webpages in Windows versions of browsers.

I do most of my HTML in HomeSite which is only available for Windows, but I have started using OpenOffice and that makes good code, so I will probably change to that.

Even after only a month, I am now confident about building a desktop PC with all the tools I need, with nothing left from the MS world. I can see that there may be some specialist tools that are only available for Windows, but it looks as if that can be handled by Wine, or Lindows. In any case I can make XP fall over after about an hour of having PhotoShop, HomeSite, two browsers, and Windows Explorer all open at the same time while I make changes to a webpage. Trying to work with two browsers and an FTP client open at the same time will also kill it! I haven't tried that yet with Linux, but I spent a whole morning with 3 desktops on KDE OpenOffice in one, and browsers in the others (Mozilla & Opera) and no hiccups at all.

I've been working with computers since 1979, initially on PDP-11, then various generations of IBM PC's, with some experience of Mac and Unix. As far as I am concerned, Win 3.11 on DOS 6.22 was the last stable OS from MS. Win98 is on it's last legs, and I am beginning to see problems due to a lack of proper backwards compatibility - the latest versions of IE6 & Outlook Express 6 are quite flacky, in fact one of my PC's just crashed while burning a CD, and Norton tells me this was due to a corrupt temp file that had been in use by Outlook Express, so I can't burn a CD and read e-mail at the same time!

I seem to have gone on rather longer than I intended, but this experience has been fun, and I found the enthusiasm of the posts on this forum quite infectious. I hope some of the other newbies find this usefull.