Which distros have ntfs partitioning capability during installation? I just want to have a dual boot system so that I can do some PHP web development and still play all of my windows-only games... actually any kind of development... all of those games just distract me :)

I know suse 9.1 and later can do it since I installed it on my laptop not long ago and it was in a single ntfs partition. Suse easily resized the ntfs partition for me and installed itself without a problem. I'd be suprised if any other linux distro do a better job since last time I checked a lot of them still used arcane and unintuitive partitioning schemes during setup.

[Edited by - daveangel on June 25, 2004 1:55:41 PM]

Any sane linux distro (meaning all) will automatically set up any NTFS partitions for you during setup. I have used NTFS on Slackware, SuSE, Redhat, and LFS. I think all of them set it up automatically besides LFS, of course, though I can't be certain. Even if your distro didn't set it up automatically though, its really easy to set up yourself, especially if NTFS support is already compiled into the kernel (which it probably is).

It's not about distro, it's about kernel. If you have one of the newer 2.6.x kernels, they have ntfs ability. If it doesn't set it up for you, just compile your own kernel and use it.

Most 2.4 kernels also have NTFS support. Also, there is some setup to be done outside of the kernel - it's not always easy figuring out what parameters to put into /etc/fstab.

Quote: Original post by clum
Most 2.4 kernels also have NTFS support. Also, there is some setup to be done outside of the kernel - it's not always easy figuring out what parameters to put into /etc/fstab.

but the 2.4 kernels don't have the writing ability. It's experimental in the 2.6 kernels (you can now also write to NTFS partitions, though it's still not recommended).

As far as I was aware (circa 2.6.4 or so), the NTFS write ability only allowed you to write existing files, i.e., you could make changes and save, but not create new files.

But isn't NTFS write experimental and dangerous?
Not the usage of ntfsresize. There are many totally different NTFS implementations for Linux and people tend to confuse them. For example there are two completely different open source NTFS driver implementations for Linux, please see here the differences between them, they are referred as old and new. Moreover there are two complete read-write NTFS drivers, one of them is Jan Kratochvil's free Captive NTFS what uses Windows' own NTFS driver the Wine way, and the other read-write one is a commercial driver from Paragon.

Ntfsresize is completely based on the new Linux-NTFS source base, started from scratch and implemented highly carefully during continuous and extensive reliability testing. The changes needed to resize an NTFS are well understood furthermore ntfsresize has rigid safety checks, including a basic NTFS consistency check, and refuses to do the resize operation if it meets an inconsistent state, unsupported or suspicious condition.
p.s.
SUSE 9.1 is the first general purpose Linux distribution that made Linux installation user-friendly alongside any Windows systems by using only open source softwares and having non-destructive NTFS data relocation support to unallocate space for Linux installation. For the latter purpose, SUSE 9.1 utilizes ntfsresize.

Perhaps most of you misunderstood my inquiry...
I don't care about accessing files on the windows drive or anything like that, I just need to repartition my harddrive without reformatting, so that i can install the OS.

does knoppix come with apache/php/a database system?
if it does, i can skip all the crapola and just cut to the fun stuff.

well letus know how your knoppix install goes and remeber to backup anything important before you start!
most distro's come with what u mentioned but if they don't just google LAMP and u set.