[LBo] dual-boot system

[Brice Hunt]

Jeff Grant wrote:
> Emen Zhao wrote:
>   
>> Hi Friends,
>>
>> I am asked to install a dual-boot system - Redhat Enterprise Edition 3 and
>> WXP... (a name I hesitate to say here, but hey it is just work, right?
>> ;-)).
>> Anyone please give some suggestion or warnings, etc I should prepare and
>> watch out for this work. Thanks in advance for your help!
>>     
>
> - Update the BIOS ASAP since most PC's only allow M$/XP to use BIOS
> updates lately.
>   
If he's going to dual boot, this really doesn't matter as he can boot
into Windows any time to do a BIOS update. Furthermore, Intel, Asus, and
many other popular motherboard manufacturers offer alternate ways of
updating BIOS (e.g. image for bootable DOS floppy) that will update the
BIOS without Windows.
> - Backup everything if this is an existing XP install.
> - Make an extra empty partition for XP and RH to share, and make it
> FAT32, not NTFS.
> - Use gparted to re-size partitions if need be:
>
> http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
>
> - Don't put all Linux filesystems on one partition - split up partitions
> something like:
>
> 20GB WINXP (NTFS)
> 64MB /boot (ext3)
> 512MB <swap>
> 20GB / (ext3)
> 20GB /home (ext3)
> 20GB /share (FAT32)
>
> The last partition being the shared space for both OS's. Keep in mind,
> this is just an example layout. Don't forget to make sure that your
> kernel supports FAT32, and *be careful* if you decide to add in Linux
> kernel support for NTFS - read/write support on NTFS using Linux can be
> hazardous!
>   
Mostly agreed (although NTFS read/write support is much improved over
even 1 year ago).
> - Always install XP first, so that it uses it's native partitioning
> tools, etc.
> - Use GRUB as your dual-boot manager - it will save you countless hours
> of headache.
>   
Agreed.  XP Pro will install itself into a dual-boot configuration, but
it will use its own (less configurable) boot manager. Installing XP
first allows you to use Grub (I believe Grub is currently the default in
RHEL). Once you learn how to configure and use Grub, you can do some
really neat things with it.
> - If you're a Linux newbie, dump X (GUI) in favor of CLI (command line).
> CLI is infinitely more powerful.
>   
If you want to be productive quickly and have never used text-based
tools before, then you can ignore this advice. If you're doing this
dual-boot setup for a customer, then you'll also want to ignore this
advice. On the other hand, if you really want to learn Linux and have
the time and computer to spare, you can learn a lot by going straight
CLI for awhile. Anyhow, don't go and install some distro (like Ubuntu
and its variants) that limits your CLI capabilities.  (Soon, I'm going
to install Kubuntu in my mother's computer because she never uses the
command line anyway. She's currently using Suse 10.0.)  Red Hat
Enterprise 3 should be an excellent choice to learn on (and its install
routine should be fairly easy to follow--even in a dual boot).

Brice Hunt
--new to the list, have used Linux since 2001.