Wanted a few good men, er, Linux guys?

[warlord at MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)]

Quoting karina.popkova at verizon.net:

> Hello
> 
> I have a Thinkpad T 41, for school, that has 
> Win XP Pro installed on it. 
> I need the functionality of Office on it, 
> but I want to transition to Linux. 
> 
> Thus I want to install a linux distro 
> with dual boot capability.
> Someone was telling me some scary stories about 
> Fedora Core (vers - ?) hosing the harddrive and
> losing the MBR (etc., etc., etc.).

That was FC2, and it was fixed in FC3.  I'm running Dual-boot XP/FC3 on my
Thinkpad T42p and it works great.

> I told this guy that with FC v.4 out 
> in "test 3" release,
> any install problems are surely fixed by now (???)
> 
> Should I look for a copy of RH 9. instead?

Nah.  You should use something much more recent.

> Has anyone set up a Thinkpad or other
> Laptop recently, with a relatively new
> version of Fedora Core (v. 3  or 4) ???

Yes.  FC3

> PCs for Eveyone wants 2 hours x $99 +
> $50 for dual boot. Can't afford $250
> for such an adventure...
> 
> Comments?

You should be able to do it yourself.  First thing I would suggest is that you
obtain SystemRescueCd from http://www.sysresccd.org/ and use qtparted to
repartition your drive.  Before you do that, be sure to defragment your drive
and disable hibernation.  Make sure all the files are at the front of the
drive.  You may need to defragment several times to get everything moved to the
front.

Then you'll want a (small) shared FAT32 partition as well as your standard Linux
partitions.

Use the "NT Bootloader" to run Linux; Keep the standard MBR and install grub
into the boot partition instead of MBR.  Then 'dd' the bootsector of that
partition into a file and store it in the FAT32 partition you created.  Then
when you reboot into XP you'll be able to set up Linux to load.  (Google for
Linux NT Bootloader for much more information).

Good Luck,

> thanks 
> 
> karina

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available