Dear sir :


Is it possible to install linux or freebsd in external usb drives(IDE hard drive)? or Internal dvd-ram ?
I wanna install to hard disk but not doing anything in my internal hd(xp).
how do i setup at the first boot?
and i want to have choose to change between winxp and other os.
(internal hd and external hd,dvd-ram boot?)

thank you for help in advance!! your assistance will be appreciated.


p.s: Anyone knows which distro offer most updated hardware and software support and also good for newbies to start with?
multimedia,programming learning,webserver,games.

p.s: Should any 1 knows about phatlinux and winlinux ? are they any good?

Let me be the first to welcome you to linux and linuxquestions.org.

Mandrake is a good starter distro that has decent hardware support. I'm only running 9.0. Not up on all of the problems with 9.2. I don't have a lot of experience with FreeBSD.

If you want to install to a USB drive then verify that the motherboard BIOS has that option to boot from USB. In addition you will need to either recompile the kernel to add USB support instead of using modules or modify the initrd i.e. initial RAM disk to include the USB modules.

No problems using either a linux bootloader or XP bootloader for linux.

I also don't know anything about Phatlinux or Winlinux. I also am unsure on how DVD-RAM drives are different then the DVD-RWs