Dual boot - recommendations?

GHoosdum

I'm a relative Linux noob. I'm planning on running a dual boot situation, Windows XP on an 80GB drive and a Linux distro on a 27GB drive.

Which OS do I install first?

Tips? My hardware is going to be Radeon 9600 NP, Soyo KM400 motherboard, Barton 2500+, 512MB Buffalo RAM, WD HDDs - are the drivers there for Linux?

What distro do you recommend? Where should I get it?

In such a dual-boot situation, can I give both the Windows folding client and the Linux folding client access to the same work directory so that I have seamless running of folding work under both OS's?

Thanks!

leishi85

i'm a relative noob for linux also, and i can answer couple of your questions.

if u are going to install winxp and linux, install winxp firts and then install a linux distro.

as for which distro, u can try mandrake first, it's a noob linux OS, and as for hardware capability, check the distro's site, they usually have a list of supported hardwares.

VileDaRKNiGHT

the best linux noob distrbution ive run across is mandrake, realitivly simple to install very windows like for ease of use for the beginners.

Later on down the road when you know what command does what or if you want a challenge try gentoo. bootstraping it is a royal pain and confusing. i fought with it for 12 hours and gave up for now.

jgoguen

If you are going to dual-boot Mandrake, be sure you say the boot loader goes on the first sector of the boot partition, NOT the MBR. There's a really good boot loader I recommend, called GAG (at http://gag.sourceforge.net). It doesn't totally screw up your Windows booting, and it's simple and easy to set up to boot both OS's. The whole install fits on one diskette too And definately install Windows first. First thing Windows does is something like a "search and destroy" for non-Microsoft stuff. Found that out the hard way once... Mandrake is definately a noob Linux distro, very easy to use, but more than good enough for almost anything you want to do.