What's up everyone,

I am a bit of a newbie at linux, so please do not mind the dumb questions. Here goes:

I installed Linux XP 2006 SR2 on an Athlon64 FX51 and it worked amazingly well. I am trying to duplicate that with another machine with no luck. I get past the Linux XP boot screen and then it sits at a dark blue screen. The mouse still works and everything. It just never gets to the login screen. Any help would be great.

Kyle

Sorry... forgot the specs on the new machine:

Audigy 4 sound card
BFG 7600 GTOC w/ 2 DVI outputs
AMD 64bit 3700+
1G Crucial RAM
300G Seagate
500W BFG PSU
AverMedia TV tuner

Also:

An MSI K8N-Neo4 Platinum/ SLI MoBo.

When you say that it got to the "boot screen", I assume you mean something like grub or lilo. Were there any choices? eg rescue mode, memory test, etc.
If goes to a blank screen, it is conceivable that it is having trouble starting the GUI (X-Windows) Try crtl-alt-F1 to see if you can get a terminal display.

When you did the install, what options were you given for setting up the bootloader? What did you choose?

If all else fails, try a more mainstream (and free) distro such as Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. (I have nothing against Linux XP, but with the others you will find more people who know the nuances of your hardware.)

Sorry for not being more specific. I am a Windows user migrating into Linux. What I mean by boot screen is the screen that loads before the login screen. It was the Linux XP logo with the progess bar at the bottom. After it gets past that, the screen turns to a darker blue. The mouse still works but there are no options and ctrl-alt-F1 doesn't work. I think that it is a hardware issue. Tried to put Windows back on the HDD, for grins and giggles, and it wouldn't install or try to format. I low-level formatted it and Windows installed fine. I partitioned the hard drive. Will Linux go on the second partition? or does it want the c:? The reason that I am going with Linux XP is that I use a lot of windows programs. I would like to install them and run them on Linux. I am considering Xandros. Do you have any opinions on Linux Xp or Xandros or is there an alternative that I may not be aware of?

Thanks in advance

From the bottom...
Neither of those is at the top of the popularity list. I have tried Xandros and it was fine, but nothing jumped out as better than others.

Running Windows SW on Linux means installing the WINE program. This will run on ANY Linux distro,and thus is not a discriminator--i.e. running Windows SW is not a unique feature of XP or Xandros.

There is no "C" drive with Linux.
The standard dual-boot setup is Window on the first partition, and Linux on the 2nd (or even on a separate physical drive. Unlike Windows, Linux can be just about anywhere.
The standard drill:
Install Windows on a partition ~10-15GB. Leave the rest of the disk unformatted.
Install Linux--During install, have it make a partition of ~7-10GB, which is mounted at "/" (the root of the Linux filesystem--analogous to C:\\ in windows). Also, have the installed make a ~1GB partition for swap space.
Leave the rest of the disk unformatted.
Teh Linux installer will put in a bootloader and will detect the Windows installation and configure accordingly. If asked, tell it to put the bootloader in the mbr of drive 1.

Finally, for the current setup, if you are seeing Linux XP and a progress bar, then you are getting past the bootloader. Do you never get a screen with booting options?

Thanks for the input.

I do not get to a screen that I have options.

I believe the bootloader is in quiet mode (graphical); to my knowledge only grub supports a quiet boot. With lilo, you always see what process its at. Depending on configurations, you may have a little logo at the top or something.

My friend really liked Xandros. I'm personally not a KDE fan, so I didn't like it very much. He had Home edition ($39), but since he liked it so much he upgraded to Home Premium ($79), I think... I've never used Linux XP, so I can't say anything about it.

You can always go to /boot and see if you have a grub directory. Or check to see if lilo is installed since every time you upgrade, you have to run the lilo command to update lilo and be able to boot into your new kernel.

in contrast to pixellany, I've heard that the rule of thumb for making a swap partition is that it should be twice your RAM, but never exceed 512 MB. That's in most of the manuals I've seen for installation process. If you have like at least 1 gig of RAM, you should really consider not creating a swap at all because most likely you'll never even touch it. I have 2 gigs, but still created 512 MB for swap on Gentoo. My system never touched the swap partition.

You can run Windows apps through an emulator such as wine, crossover, or something like that. Or you can just use a system emulator, but that requires a really good system, I've heard. When I need Internet Explorer, I installed ies4linux, which required wine and cabextract (to read cab files).

Touche---I am a bit lazy about this.
Actually, I have seen more "rules of thumb" that I can handle...
Also, it does depend on what you are doing. If --eg--you edit a lot of large image files, memory fills up really fast.

What I have NOT seen is substantive discussions on how much swap to use. For example, what harm would it do to have more than 512MB??