Which OS is easier to dual boot with XP: Suse 9.2 or Xandros 3? Others?
 

Im going to take the plunge and install Linux on my Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100.

I don't want to jump right in and completely format for Linux, as I use the laptop a bit for gaming so I'd like to keep the XP partition.

As XP is allready installed, and the partition is taking up the whole HDD, I'm going to resize the XP partion down to about 10-20GB and leave the other 40-50GB for a linux distro. I had a look around my CDs and found two relatively up-to-date distros: Suse 9.2 and Xandros Desktop OS 3. I've heard that Suse stuffs up XP's File ALlocation Table, but my XP insall is on an NTFS partion. WIll it still be affected? I don't really mind about having a 'newbies' distro, just not something like Slack where I won't have a hope of figuring out anything. I'm leaning towards Suse, unless I won't be able to dual boot with it. Is Xandros any better at this? The reason I'm leaning towards Suse is I hear about it alot more than Xandros, so I assume it is a more widely used distro.

Do you have any other sugestions for distros? Something I'd be happy with?

The stats of my Toshiba are:
2GHz P4
Toshiba Version 1.60 BIOS
256MB ram
NVIDIA GeForce 420 Go Graphics (Not sure exactly but i believe it is about 32 meg)
60GB HDD

Thanks for your help,
Luke

Dual/multi booting is pretty straightforward once you get the hang of whichever boot loader you prefer to use - grub/lilo. Some distros are better than others at adding existing os to the boot menu but thats about it. Haven't tried Suse for a while, its up to 10.1 now and seems to have its problems but didnt suit me anyway, xandros is ok, point and click for the most part but a bit boring. I quite like pclinuxos, pretty slick looking and excellent documentation, mandriva based so very good for new users but the general advice here is get a hold of some live cds and see what catches your eye.

Ok, well I shoved in GPARTED LIVE CD and re-sized my windows partition to 25GB. I'm now in the process of installing Suse. I manually set the partition and booting settings to make sure nothing bad happened but this is the first time I've dual booted with linux so I hope I didnt screw anything over....

If everything works fine, my next post will be from the SUse system!!!

Good luck, MonsterAar. Let me add (for future reference of others that may read this thread) that it would probably be best to use GRUB instead of LILO to handle the dual boot. Also, put it in your MBR (master boot record). You should have fewer problems that way.

I'm using GRUB, and I told it to install into the MBR so all is good!

This post is coming from my Suse system!!!

Congratulations, MonsterAar! :cool: