[ILUG] Laptops

[Cian Davis]

I bought a Dell Latitude D410 a while ago and have it happily dual
booting with Debian Sarge and Windows XP.

The only tricky thing with the Dell anyway is that it has it's own 10MB
partition first thing on the hard drive. What I did when I got the
laptop was boot from XP CD, repartition from within Windows setup and
then boot from Sarge CD. Make sure you use a new enough Sarge CD. The
Broadcom GigE NIC driver disappeared for a while from sarge (tg3 driver)
but is back now.

Windows doesn't like you messing with HDD partition tables any more than
any other OS. In that, to repartition, you generally need to delete and
recreate partitions. I would strongly suggest putting Windows on the
first usable partition of the disk. Otherwise it might install as
D:\Windows and it's a PITA to fix. With Linux on the other hand, you can
get it to do exactly what you want.

NTFS can be read from within Linux. Writing NTFS isn't recommended still
AFAIK.

Cian

Kevin Philp wrote:

>We have to buy a laptop for one of our new guys and he will need to plug it 
>into our network when he is in the office. It will be our first laptop user 
>based in the office so its new territory for me. Two options:
>
>1. Let him keep his laptop with WinXP on it and set up Samba to support him.
>
>2. Force him to comply to our Linux only network and dual boot his laptop so 
>he can use Linux when he is here.
>
>I prefer option 2 but he is complaining that "WinXP doesn't like you messing 
>with hard drive partition tables"... is there any truth in this or can I 
>happily repartition his laptop hard drive, drop Linux on and boot from Grub?
>
>Any bad experiences on dual booting Linux with WinXP on laptops?
>
>Doesn't WinXP use ntfs and how well is that supported in Linux?
>
>Kevin.
>  
>