Hi, I don't know much about linux, so i guess i'm in the right bit

Q1) I was told that i can have Windows XP as well as Linux, Is this true? If so, How do i use both?

Q2) I was also told that Slackware would be the best for beginners like me, what would you guys suggest?

Take both with a grain of salt :)

Ad 1)
You can have both windows and linux installed,
but only use them concurrently. To use one from
within the other you'd need vmware, qemu or
something the like that would emulate a whole
PC that then runs the other OS.

Ad 2)
It depends on what you expect/want, if you want
to learn much about linux in a short time, slack is
perfect. If you want a no-brainer to go online, play
the odd game and do some office stuff, use mandrake.
Slack is quick and easy to install, but that's where
it stops to hold your hand - after that you HAVE
to read and learn.


Cheers,
Tink

Q1) Yes you can. Go to http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...icle&artid=196 or do a search for "dual boot" within LQ. Hint: you need to repartition your hard drive

Q2) Yes and no. You need to know a fair bit about your hardware and be comfortable installing programs from source to use Slackware, although it is fairly friendly if you don't need wizards and can read instructions. I personally would suggest either Mandrake, Fedora or SuSE for a first timer.

Welcome to LQ

Thanks for the fast reply I think Slackware will suit my needs, i will do abit more reading as the first anser you gave me sounds complicated

Which distro to install as a beginner, well it really is a matter of opinioun but if you want to have somthing that is relitivly easy to install you can go for Mandrake, SuSE, or Red Hat. If you are carefull when you install them and don't kill your windows installation you will be rewarded with a system with a boot menu that will let you boot your choice windows or Linux.

1)a linux install can exist on the same hard drive as windows....it typically is installed to a separate partition. So you will need to add 2 partitions to your hard drive. One for the root directory, and the other for swap space. Usually the linux installer will do this for you.
The linux install usually writes over your bootrecord with grub or lilo to allow you to choose to boot linux or windows. It is possible though to use the windows bootloader to load grub so you wont have to overwrite your MBR.

2) I like slackware, it forces you to learn, but you have to have a lot of patience. Once you get good at searching for answers to questions, you will really like slackware.

there are currently a ton of people debating the same question "what distro to use", check this one out
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=243180

p.s. looks like i was a little late responding

Hehe, thanks for all your replys, well i think i will go for an easy to use Distribution so i can learn a bit about Linux, then i will go to Slackware when i have the hang of things.

If you use SuSE as your main distro and not slackware, does that make you a n00b? I kinda like SuSE.

vegetacron, I dont think that. Every distribution has the same base software installed, if you wanted to you could make suse act and look exactly like slackware. The only learning advantage you have with slackware is that you are forced to learn the commands. If you wanted to use a version of SUSE to learn linux, then just install fluxbox and dont use KDE or gnome. fluxbox does not have all the GUI tools that KDE/gnome has, so you would be forced to use the good-ole command prompt.

p.s. my boss is a linux guru, and all he uses is Red Hat products

I've got XP, SuSE and Mandrake installed on my laptop. Before you choke on the idea, It's a new laptop that came with XP and has a 100 Gig hard drive. And I wanted to try a couple AMD64 distro's.

At least on my Desktop, I've found that Mandrake has consistantly been the distro which could install on my hardware when SuSE and Redhat couldn't.

SuSE has a bit of an XP like style. The blue curve style for Red Hat has nicely done graphics and icons, and the menu layout may be better.

Mandrake is able to install on more computers because they have patches in the kernel which can handle a wider range of hardware. Some people who compile their own kernels, prefer to use an official kernel, which you could opt to use instead.

Fluxbox.org I've been to the site and the skins they have look cool, but as with every site that shows cool skins like that, it hides the base install pics and doesn't mention that in order to get your desktop to look like one of those theres a lot of work and alot of reading how-tos. What is missing in fluxbox that KDE and Gnome have?

Fluxbox can use KDE and Gnome programs, as long as they are installed () - the difference between Fluxbox and KDE/Gnome is that Fluxbox needs everything to be hand configured. There are no tools in built. The plus side of this is that the menu only shows what you want it to show. The downside is that you have to know what you have installed to be able to add it.

vegetacron, fluxbox doesnt come with tools like the ones for adding users, editing runlevels, disk management...although some of these tools will work in it, they do not come with it. I believe KDE comes with a large set of configuration tools...including a "control panel" type tool. These tools are merely GUIs that echo the basic commands that are found on most unix-based systems.

for a moment there I forgot what this thread was about, lets stick to the topic at hand please