I am thinking of running CentOS 4.0, dual-boot with Windows XP.

Has anyone tried this (the one and only reviewer in Distro Reviews apparently has), and can comment on the ease of installation, and how well CentOS4 works as a personal OS as opposed to an 'enterprise server' OS?
I intend to use it for software development, but I'd still need the usual Internet, Open Office etc stuff.

Thanks

Can't tell you about dual booting WinXP or any Windows as I don't have them installed. I do have it dual booting with Fedora and it's a piece of cake. Actually, can't see why it should be any problem with Windows as that will be detected at install.
It comes with Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office and looks pretty much like any other linux distro with kde or gnome.

I've got CentOS 4 dual booting with WinXP. No problems at all. I installed grub to the MBR. I let the installer make an entry in grub for windows. The only thing I changed was after install I edited grub to say windows xp instead of other, and change the timeout to 10 seconds instead of 5. As always, back up before moving partitions or doing a dual boot machine.

The CentOS install looks just like Fedora or Red Hat. Anaconda. So far seems to be stable, works well. Kernel 2.6.9. Like all Red Hat distros it doesn't have mp3 support with it. You'll have to install Lame. It did not have gkrellm on the install disks either. I used Fedora rpms for gkrellm, xmms lame support ect. and they worked fine. I also used a Fedora mplayer browser plug-in. I forced it with --nodep. It also works fine in Firefox. I compiled mplayer from source. You'll need to have gcc and friends installed to compile. Those were FC2 rpms that I used by the way. Your not suppose to do that, but they are all Red Hat and the ones I used worked ok. CentOS is a little more stable than FC2. The network stalls are not as frequent. When browsing the net for a long while, and the browser just seems to die, a simple "ifdown eth0" then "ifup eth0" puts it in action again.

DAG has rpms for RHEL, so you can use those instead of using Fedora rpms.

Well, the install went pretty well, though I did have a hiccup with burning the disks - but that's probably just due to faulty CDs.

CentOS4 runs well and good.
Unfortunately, I've run into a problem with using GRUB.
Basically I'm running on 2 SATA hard disks of 80 GB each, one for Windows XP with 2 partitions, the other for Linux with 3 partitions (/, /home and swap partition).
Windows XP was installed first, followed by CentOS 4.0 (though I did install Mandrake 10.1 previously, but completely removed that install).
My CentOS install was a custom selection, but I did not go further in configuring grub, aside from changing the name of the Windows XP selection, and making Windows XP default.

The symptoms are: when trying to load windows xp, the boot parameters from the grub installation are displayed, and grub hangs.

From what I can remember, the output when grub hangs is:
Booting 'Windows XP'
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

Here's my grub.conf file, grub having been installed on mbr:
Now, I tried searching for a solution, and the most comprehensive I've seen is one for Fedora Core 2: Making Fedora Core 2 and Windows play well together.

Unfortunately, I dont seem able to use the preventive measures suggested, and the recovery solution does not seem to work at all.

Does anyone know of a working solution for CentOS4?
Thanks

Oh, in case this it is useful, here's my output from
sfdisk -d /dev/sda

That looks like windows is on drive 2 so you may have success with the map command...
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
chainloader +1

Yep, that solved the problem.

Thanks

Glad ya got it going!

homey i would just like to say thank you because everyone else was wrong for an xp dual boot! (they all left out the two map commands)

you just saved me hours and hours of reading boring documentation =)

im a complete linux n00b. just to be forewarned. i'm having trouble getting centos4 to dual boot w/ anything to be honest. ive tried upgrading to centos5 but the cdrom drive keeps saying every iso i've gotten has a bad checksum (sounds bad don't know what it means) i'm not exactly computer literate but i was told to install this so it could run a program i need for work. all traces of windows are gone, i have an XP install disk that doesnt boot, along with linux mint and a gparted live cd all using the iso (other than the windows that one i bought) and none of them are able to make the pc boot from the cd. the only cd that actually works for a boot disk is the original cd from centos4. any help?