I won''t have a whole drive for Linux, just a proportion of it (I can''t dedicate 17.2gb to Linux! ) But since nothing else boots from there, I don''t think there could be any risk. How will I decide to boot from that drive though, since by default it will boot from the first drive? Would it be a case of going into the BIOS, swapping the boot order round, and then rebooting? (I''m a dual-boot newbie ) To be honest, I wouldn''t mind having to insert a boot disk or something to run Linux since I will be running Windows probably about twice as often (until I get up to speed with Linux as a desktop OS, anyway).
And as for the ANSI C thing... I much prefer that too. I like to know that my code will work no matter what platform I''m on. I wouldn''t want to use MFC or AFX etc etc anyway, as they seem horribly bloated for what they are. If you want classes, ANSI C++ has some nice ones in the STL, and there are other libraries available.
Ok, one little thing, you don''t need to disable plug and play from the bios in order to get Linux to install... ( I''ve installed it and ran it with PNP ON and there''s no problems at all... ( I''ve been running it for more than 5 years.. ) ) Second, all you need is to get Mandrake and run the install you''ll be able ( I think ) to resize partitions so that you can put linux on it..
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Ok, one little thing, you don''t need to disable plug and play from the bios in order to get Linux to install... ( I''ve installed it and ran it with PNP ON and there''s no problems at all... ( I''ve been running it for more than 5 years.. ) )
I was under the impression that, for plug and play to work under Mandrake, it has to have had the BIOS set up the software rather than wait for the OS to set it up. In fact I thought I saw that in the documentation. I''d rather not play with IRQs where I can get something else to do it.
I''ve had a variety of Linux distributions dual booting with Win98 with PnP switched on in BIOS. Things seemed to work OK. This was about 6 months ago too, and PnP support''s improved since then. One of the distributions I had installed then was Mandrake 6.0. No problems then; I can''t imagine it being any worse with release 7.
Kylotan, let me get this straight in my mind: You''ve got two HDDs, a master and a slave. The master drive is all Windows, the slave will be part Linux. If that is the case, simply installing Linux into the slave drive and sticking LILO in the MBR of that drive should be enough to get it to work.
Dual booting really is quite easy. I''ve never had any problems with it at all. On a single-drive system (irrespective of the number of partitions) just put the Windows partitions in the first half of the drive and Linux in the second part of the drive. On a multi-drive system, put Windows first again. Linux is very clever and will work wherever it''s put. If LILO doesn''t work, loadlin will let you load Linux without any problems. Failing that, every distribution will offer to create a boot disk.
Finally, DayTripper, what functions did your classes do? The chances are that most distributions come with libraries to do the task you want. If the problem is that Linux is written in C rather than C++, well I can''t help you there
Are you insane? Linux is a nightmare to code on. I don''t think you''ve ever actually used Win2k when you make statements like that. Win2k doesn''t crash, period. My computer has been on for approx 40 days straight now. My linux record was closer to 20 days when I wasn''t using it for anything, and probably about 5 hours when I was coding on it. So now I only use Linux as my backup OS for coding CGI. (Win98 is crap though, no argument there)
I don''t know what package you''re using, but I''ve been using Linux for about a year now, and haven''t had it crash yet. I hear that some people have kept it on 24/7 for over a year without crashing. Be aware that some distributions are different than others.
Linux is too close to ANSI C, you can''t do anything on it w\o serious effort. Whereas in windows I have an enormous array of helpful classes. So the only thing I use Linux for is for compiling my CGI programs (which I happily code in windows). Anyway, my main point was about the lack of an IDE, I''ll check out the link you mentioned.
I''ve been taking C++ programming classes, and my code works well with Linux. Wait - you said C, not C++! You DO know that you can compile C++ also, right?
And you''re right when you say I haven''t done any Windows programming.
Anyway, I''ve never encountered any problems with programming or crashing in Linux. Sorry if I don''t view it as a "nightmare." I love it.
Kylotan, let me get this straight in my mind: You''ve got two HDDs, a master and a slave. The master drive is all Windows, the slave will be part Linux. If that is the case, simply installing Linux into the slave drive and sticking LILO in the MBR of that drive should be enough to get it to work.
That is exactly the case. But how will the BIOS decide which one to boot? It will always find the Windows drive first, no? Is there a keypress to swap that at power-on time or will I have to either change the drive boot order in the bios or use loadlin?
quote:
If LILO doesn''t work, loadlin will let you load Linux without any problems. Failing that, every distribution will offer to create a boot disk.
I am tempted to just go with the boot disk option, letting it boot into Windows normally and Linux if I have the disk in. It''s not that much of a hassle, I''d think. Or I guess having loadlin as an MSDOS-mode shortcut in Windows might be convenient too.
Thanks for your help! Should be going ahead with this as soon as I get my backups back from The-Housemate-With-The-Cd-Burner
-- DayTripper Said -- Are you insane? Linux is a nightmare to code on. I don''t think you''ve ever actually used Win2k when you make statements like that. Win2k doesn''t crash, period. My computer has been on for approx 40 days straight now. My linux record was closer to 20 days when I wasn''t using it for anything, and probably about 5 hours when I was coding on it. So now I only use Linux as my backup OS for coding CGI. (Win98 is crap though, no argument there)... -- End of DayTripper''s Quote --
I think you need to try it again. First of all if you''ve been running Win2K for 40 days and it didn''t crash, the system was probably off. As far as linux goes, if you know how to program, it won''t crash when you write code on it. Linux is far more supperior to WINDOWS.. That''s why all of the biggest computer sofware companies are starting to make more drivers, apps and even starting to port more games on to linux. Just take borland who''s porting Delphi & Borland C++ and merging it into the Kylix project. And as for office suites, Sun''s Star Office is way more supperior to Microsoft Office.
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Ok, one little thing, you don''t need to disable plug and play from the bios in order to get Linux to install… ( I''ve installed it and ran it with PNP ON and there''s no problems at all… ( I''ve been running it for more than 5 years.. ) )
I was under the impression that, for plug and play to work under Mandrake, it has to have had the BIOS set up the software rather than wait for the OS to set it up. In fact I thought I saw that in the documentation. I''d rather not play with IRQs where I can get something else to do it.
As far as it goes, I didn''t have to change anything in my BIOS. I''ve installed 2 weeks ago. Although, my distro is SuSE and it''s the one that I prefer to use. Anyhow, I''ll be at the Linux Expo in Montreal next week. I''ll ask the guys from Mandrake and try to post back if I have a chance. I''m trying to get my Linux Game Programming Company up and running and I also work for an ISP here in MTL. Anyhow, talk to y''a later.
Cyberdrek Headhunter Soft DLC Multimedia Two Guys Soft
Following the above thread, I tried to install Mandrake last night. It was a waste of my time. Here''s why...
Firstly, the automatic partitioning simply did not work. Asking it to resize one of my 2 FAT32 partitions to make room for a Linux one made the installer bomb out with an INT 9 (Seg Fault?), and I had to restart. This happened 2 or 3 times, so I gave up on that route. So I deleted the partitions and tried another route.
I got MS fdisk to make me 2 smaller FAT32 partions and then fired up the Mandrake install to add Linux ones at the end. When I did this, it brought up an -extremely- obscure error, which I recognised as telling me that the boot sector needs to be on a cylinder < 1024. The message was certainly -not- suitable for new users and if that is who they are aiming at with this ''easy'' setup, they are failing.
So the next attempt was to remove all these partitions, add Linux in first, and get the Linux Mandrake installer to split the remaining space into FAT32 partitions. I sized Linux to what I thought would be a reasonable size (just over 1gb) and asked it to make me 2 FAT32 partitions, which appeared to work ok.
I proceeded with the install, it asked me which of a long list of packages I wished to use. Now, here was a glaring oversight - no indication of how large these packages were! I guessed that I had enough space, or at the least, it would install the most important ones first. But this really annoyed me as I was working blind.
Once everything was copied to the disk, I rebooted into Linux, hit ''startx'', and... well, I got a basic X view with 2 terminal windows, and nothing else. Mouse clicks didn''t work and there was nothing else on the screen. I managed to shut it down, but it was utterly useless - so much for KDE working as soon as you install. Maybe I didn''t have enough disk space to install it. I don''t know, nothing deigned to tell me. I would have thought KDE would have been installed earlier than some of the other things, so 1gb should have been enough, no?
So, having had enough of this, I booted back into Windows, only to find out that it didn''t recognise my 2 FAT32 partitions on the shared drive. Now, was this Windows being incompetent or the Mandrake install being incompetent? Either way, MS fdisk was not able to delete the partitions on there, nor even remove the DOS logical drives that were created. I downloaded a little partiton utility from download.com, which told me that the 2 FAT32 partitions both had invalid entries in the partition table, or something like that. So from there, I was able to remove them, and go into fdisk to add myself 2 working FAT32 partitions again.
So, as you may be able to guess, overall I am very disappointed with the Linux Mandrake installation procedure. Having installed Red Hat before on a blank machine, I had hoped that the install technology had moved on. In my experience, it hasn''t, unless you count pretty rollovers on the buttons and 3 colour schemes for the installer as progress. Finding online help for the process is difficult as many existing users installed it ''the hard way'' and have no experience of a ''simple'' GUI installer. I may try next weekend with Corel Linux instead, as although I hear the security and features are not as good, maybe the install actually works.
I would recommend buying a book. When I first installed a Linux distro I picked up Mastering Linux. It came with Red Hat 6.0 and covered the installation process in enough detail to get me through a couple of problems I had with it. I''ve also seen a couple of the For Dummies books (for Red Hat and SuSE) and they cover installation well also.
) But since nothing else boots from there, I don''t think there could be any risk. How will I decide to boot from that drive though, since by default it will boot from the first drive? Would it be a case of going into the BIOS, swapping the boot order round, and then rebooting? (I''m a dual-boot newbie 
