laptop xp and linux dual boot

mm2000 · 12-29-2005, 04:59 AM

Bought a laptop yesterday!

Of course I want dual boot on it. I have used linux a few years (fedora2), and thinking about what dist is best suited on a laptop...

I have a router att home; netgear wgr614 and wireless lan on the laptop. The connection works fine in windows XP.
What dist do you think is best suited for this? And how should I create the dual boot? -XP is preinstalled on the laptop, so I think partition magic is one way to handle the problem. I have never used partition magic before, is there anything to think of when using it?

I would be very happy if someone can help med with this problem!

ankscorek · 12-29-2005, 05:15 AM

any distro is good but incase u r a beginner u can try SUSE

Baldrick65 · 12-29-2005, 05:33 AM

Quote:

I have never used partition magic before, is there anything to think of when using it?

The best thing to do is get Partition Magic to create the free space and get the distro to do the rest. Most recent distros have pretty decent hardware detection.

Baldrick

mm2000 · 12-29-2005, 07:45 AM

I am thinking about ubuntu, do you think the installation can sense my wireless lan on the laptop?
I saw ubuntu was only one cd to install, and I assume some sort of internet connection must be to complete the whole installation.

jwspring · 12-29-2005, 09:20 AM

I used knoppix and it's qtparted. just burn knoppix to a cd, boot up on the knoppix cd and run qtparted. It's graphical interface is very straight forward. You can get it from the links on linuxiso.org

mcmillan · 12-29-2005, 02:13 PM

I think there's a decent chance ubuntu will be able to recognize the wireless, though I've heard that's one of trickier things with linux in general. If it doesn't you'll still have a workable computer without the connection just with what's on the one cd, and will need to do some tweaking to get the wireless to work.

blizunt7 · 12-29-2005, 04:36 PM

Ive dual booted my sony vaio Z1 with XP and FC4, its great. Used partition magic and installed fedora. The only issue i had was right after the partitions were created, for some reason my XP partition went inactive, so I had to use the partition magic emergency boot disks to set it active again. Good luck.

mm2000 · 12-29-2005, 04:41 PM

Installed (k)ubuntu but got main problems!

I cant start X!

"fatal server error
error signal 4
server aborting"

or something like that.

ankscorek · 12-30-2005, 05:04 AM

only two tings are required

1. Hor Refresh rate of your LCD
2. Vert Refresh rate

feed it inot your xorg.conf

mm2000 · 12-30-2005, 05:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ankscorek

only two tings are required

1. Hor Refresh rate of your LCD
2. Vert Refresh rate

feed it inot your xorg.conf

How do I do that?