Dual-Booting Linux and Windows

I posted this in the Panasonic Toughbook group, although it is not really Toughbook-specific.

This is a short tutorial on installing Sidux Linux onto an existing Windows XP partition. It should work equally well with any variant of Windows. This is a risky operation, and you should at very least back up the contents of your My Documents directory, and any other things you want to keep. Linux is very good now about manipulating filesystems that try to lock themselves out from other operating systems, but it is a good basic idea to back up anything that you consider important.

Linux is very easy to install, if you have a separate disk to put it on. Dual booting is a way to test Linux and keep your existing Windows installation; many people find that installing Linux by itself now is easier than installing Windows. There are many live CDs that will let you try Linux temporarily (Sidux is one) but performance is very slow unless you have a lot of ram. The only tricky part in dual-booting is safely resizing an NTFS partition so that Windows doesn't misbehave (as in, "WHERE'S MY STUFF!"). We will demonstrate how to safely resize an NTFS Windows disk, install Linux, and make it dual boot. You only need to choose an operating system from a menu.

There are many great Linux variants today. In the last few years, Debian (most notably in the form of Knoppix) has become a real star on hardware detection. Since some companies try to keep how their hardware works a proprietary secret, latest and greatest hardware can sometimes be more difficult to use in Linux. In general, the older the hardware, the greater the chances that it "just works". Another very good distro now is Ubuntu, also based on Debian. Mandriva is also good at nearly everything. Linux Mint contains a lot of Windows codecs, and is good for multimedia. This tutorial should be helpful should you wish to dual-boot any other kind of Linux.

There is a very active forum at http://sidux.com as well as an active IRC channel. You can get the latest version of Sidux here. Look through the directory tree, there is a directory called Releases that contains the ISO. There are always two versions, a Full and a Lite version. The Lite is smaller (almost half the size of the Full), does not include Open Office and some other large apps (though you can add anything at any other time). The install traditionally has been one CD, there is now and an optional DVD image with more apps.

This tutorial requires Flash, in a reasonably modern browser. Your mileage may vary, not responsible for accidents.

thx,
Scott S.

 

Very nice! Did you write it; if so - very well done!

 

Yes I did, thanks. The trick was to do it in VMware, so that I could have an OS running to capture everything across the reboots. It's pretty straight-forward, as long as you get the NTFS partition resized OK. Still, back everything up that's important!

 

Hi i tried to install Redhat Linux (RHEL) on my dell Inspiron 1520 notebook. It has a 250GB SATA hard drive but when enter into the GUI mode of RHEL and proceed to partition either automatically or with Disk Druid, i get an error message which says that RHEL did not detect any drives to create partitions on. I tried to create a RAW partition and one with FAT32 but that did not work. I really want a multiple operating system on my notebook i.e Windows XP Pro, Windows Vista and RHEL. Please could someone help me with installation of RHEL only. Thanks.

 

Picoshark....thanks, btw, how is the hardware detection of Sidux? I have an intel 4965 card which has been my problem with many distros, sans the 'buntu's, fedora and mandriva. I've never tried Sidux, although I have heard it's a bleeding edge Debian based distro.

EDIT: looks like not right now, but planned as it's embedded in the next xx.23 Kernel? Correct?