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Linux in my laptop
- Thread starter monasa
- Start date
This person seemed to do fine with that laptop:
He used Gentoo, but it should be pretty much the same for Red Hat or whatever else. You might try using a live CD like Knoppix to get a feel for how Linux will behave with your hardware "out-of-the-box".
I run Linux next to Windows XP on my Sony laptop without any trouble at all. I use Captive so that I can read and write to my Windows partition from within Linux. I also find that Wine works much better if you have a real Windows partition to work with. I run MS Office and Visual Studio just fine from my Linux side, for instance.
The only ticky part there is the initial resizing of the NTFS partition. Check the older postings here for advice on that (hint: you may have to use one distribution to resize the partition before installing the distribution you really want to use - or buy a commercial partitioning tool).
He used Gentoo, but it should be pretty much the same for Red Hat or whatever else. You might try using a live CD like Knoppix to get a feel for how Linux will behave with your hardware "out-of-the-box".
I run Linux next to Windows XP on my Sony laptop without any trouble at all. I use Captive so that I can read and write to my Windows partition from within Linux. I also find that Wine works much better if you have a real Windows partition to work with. I run MS Office and Visual Studio just fine from my Linux side, for instance.
The only ticky part there is the initial resizing of the NTFS partition. Check the older postings here for advice on that (hint: you may have to use one distribution to resize the partition before installing the distribution you really want to use - or buy a commercial partitioning tool).
I've done several dual-boots and have had few issue with any of them. Currently, I have Fedora Core 2 on my Toshiba Satellite. I'm tri-booting with WinXP Pro and Win2k Pro.
oppcos is right about the partitioning. I used BootIT NG for partitioning the drive as needed. What I had to do was this (keep in mind the laptop was preloaded with Win2k Pro using the entire disc):
1. Defrag drive
2. Use BootIT to resize the drive down by 2/3
3. Install WinXP Pro manually specifying 1/2 of the remaining free space to be used
4. Install FC2 and selected the remaining portion of unused space and using GRUB as my boot manager
The key to all of this is the use of the third-party partitioning tool. There have been many issues posted on the Net about dual-booting Win?? with *nix. I've personally had issues in two arenas.
1. Using OS tools to partition
2. Ignoring messages at install time (especially on *nix installs)
As for issue #1 - In my experience OSs typically would rather not know about anything else on the system but the hardware/firmware. When you start telling them to share the resources they can get snotty with you.
By using a third-party partition manager, you can let the OSs claim "plausible denyability" about anything outside their happy chunk of drive space.
As for issue #2 - Most people look at status messages during install and only see "blah, blah, blah...". If you're dual-booting that can be suicide. You especially want to look for any message that mentions the partition table, partition alignment or boot sector.
Every problem I've had was seen in the form of a status message BEFORE I had the problem. I was just usually too impatient, arrogant or ignorant of the meaning to catch it in time.
You might want to look into the bugzilla entries before you take on this project, especially if it's your first attempt.
Good luck and I hope this helps.
oppcos is right about the partitioning. I used BootIT NG for partitioning the drive as needed. What I had to do was this (keep in mind the laptop was preloaded with Win2k Pro using the entire disc):
1. Defrag drive
2. Use BootIT to resize the drive down by 2/3
3. Install WinXP Pro manually specifying 1/2 of the remaining free space to be used
4. Install FC2 and selected the remaining portion of unused space and using GRUB as my boot manager
The key to all of this is the use of the third-party partitioning tool. There have been many issues posted on the Net about dual-booting Win?? with *nix. I've personally had issues in two arenas.
1. Using OS tools to partition
2. Ignoring messages at install time (especially on *nix installs)
As for issue #1 - In my experience OSs typically would rather not know about anything else on the system but the hardware/firmware. When you start telling them to share the resources they can get snotty with you.
By using a third-party partition manager, you can let the OSs claim "plausible denyability" about anything outside their happy chunk of drive space.
As for issue #2 - Most people look at status messages during install and only see "blah, blah, blah...". If you're dual-booting that can be suicide. You especially want to look for any message that mentions the partition table, partition alignment or boot sector.
Every problem I've had was seen in the form of a status message BEFORE I had the problem. I was just usually too impatient, arrogant or ignorant of the meaning to catch it in time.
You might want to look into the bugzilla entries before you take on this project, especially if it's your first attempt.
Good luck and I hope this helps.
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