I just received a Sony VAIO, Pentium M.

It came with XP.I would like to have both XP and Suse 10.0 on the Sony.

When I tried this on my old Toshiba Sat.(Celeron) with XP, and Suse 8.0, it was a disaster.I uninstalled XP and used Suse exclusively.

Is it better to only use Suse 10.0, and not bother to attempt to partition with XP?



Thank-You!

If you can live with going solo on SuSE, you have nothing to lose even assuming you fail at setting up the dual boot. So you may as well go for it.

I would still be interested in learning of the experiences of others that may (or may not) have been successful in installing XP, and 10.0 togetgher.

Thanks for your response though.

I am in the middle of said battle right now. I have a thinkpad I am trying to get to dual boot. I know as soon as I can install it with 10.0 it will be smooth as silk. The only hard part is the partioning itself, which neither Windows nor the SuSE boot disks will partition. As soon as I get it to partition, I have no fear dual booting with GRUB will be quite easy, and Windows XP and SuSE 10.0 will play nicely.

That said, if you expect to access files in the other partitions(which I don't) I would go with FAT on both Win XP and SuSE 10, otherwise you will have a pain in terms of file access. If you wish you can also have a 3rd partition, Windows XP in NTFS, SuSE 10 in XFS, and a storage partition in FAT. Provided you think about this, it shouldn't be tough to get dual boot going, even on a lap top.

I have suse 10, slackware 10.2, and windows xp all on one computer.

I did this by getting the first drive andd making a partition for windows xp, I then installed xp and used a program called system commander.

after that I made the partitions for slackware and made the partition bootable, then did the same for suse. they are both runnig lilo.

This way I can reinstall xp whenever I gets messed up and both my linuxs are fine.

I have a Sony Vaio FS640/W lappy, Pentium M, and it has XP and Suse 10 on it. All you have to do is pop the install disc in, and let Suse have a go at it, Suse 10 detects the Windows drive and will even mount it for you. The difference here is that you probably still have the XP home edition that came pre-installed on your Sony. I remedied that by removing XP Home and installing XP Pro. In doing so, I wiped the hard drive clean, and, as darkhatter said, created a partition for Windows and left the rest of the drive blank (On my 120GB I put XP on 30 and gave the rest to Suse). With the free space, pop in the Suse CD and let 'er rip, Suse will detect and mount the Windows drive (if you like). I've had no problems, and an considering deleting my XP completely. Suse 10 is that much better. Enjoy!

Thanks for the info.
It is all very pertinant.

Are there enough LINUX versions of everything available to function now entirely on LINUX?

On my previous Tosh. Sat. with 8.0, I still relied heavily upon access to a PC with Windows. Even things such as Real Player did not have very usable LINUX applications, and streaming video was pretty hopeless most of the time.

I too have the pre-installed XP Home, and will get rid of that.

If it is possible to function entirely with 10.0, and no Windows, I would rather do that.

Okay after partioning, I used the SLICK install CD(same base as SuSE) worked like a charm, so smooth, so easy.

vcroww2 it depends on what you want to do with your computer, because you can do just about everything in linux now, like a list of everything you need to do will be helpful

I am not a programmer. I spend a lot of time sending documents, and images back and forth. In Europe most of the big places are using LINUX- no problems there. In the US- it is mostly Windows. I sometimes have trouble viewing images, and documents sent via Windows.

Perhaps now, with my new 10.o distro., all of that will change.

Well most of that would be filetype I would think. So long as you have the right viewing software, any video or image file would be readable. And with OpenOffice, all MS office documents open, on rare occasion some of them have little twitchy aspects, and that is usually formatting, but aside from that, I have had no issues using SuSE 10 to open any video, music/audio file, document, or anything else yet.

Once you get the little things configured, linux is just beautiful.

Red Shirt-

Thanks, your response is quite reassuring.

Streamimg, in all of its many aspects, is going fine as well?

Video and music both. Trailer from yahoo and toher places for movies, I stream my local radio station through FireFox. I believe mplayer handles both, but I know for sure mplayer handles the movies. The music just worked, I had to get the mozilla mplayer plugin to do movies, then zoom zoom.

Thanks, that is great news!

haha i have a vgn FS660/w...with suse 10 and xp pro...we should talk..haha...email me at rbancer@gmail.com