Harddrive space to fill

[rossi46]

I'm taking delivery of a new 40GB drive for free on monday. One of my colleagues gave it to me for nothing. It's never been used for anything before so I'm looking for suggestions as to what distro to put on it.

I've just finished installing and configuring Mandriva 2007 on my spare PC and I run a dual-boot Mandriva 2006/XP Pro PC as my main machine (this one). I had the idea of dual booting (on separate drives) my spare PC with a distro suggested in this very thread, but I don't know if it can be done on two separate drives? Can it and which do you suggest? Which is the most reliable distro for recognising hardware?

Paul

[Cabhan]

Of course you can dual-boot on two different drives .

As for hardware recognition, if hardware works on Linux, you can get it to work on any version of Linux. Knoppix has generally been known for its hardware detection, but I'd recommend selecting a distro based on other factors.

If you've never tried SuSE, Debian, Arch, Slackware, or any of those, now might be a good time!

[burntfuse]

If you really want to mess around with your system internals and get to know them well, I'd recommend Slackware or Debian. It's always nice to have a sort of "development system" where you can mess with your init scripts, rebuild your kernel every day, and install all kinds of software which hooks into the low-level system, all without worrying about losing data or your stable setup.

[xxqq]

It's rather complex and difficult for Newbie.

http://thestarport.com/people/steve/...e-distros.html

Perhaps you can try Poor man's install of Knoppix LiveCD distro, or running several LiveCD from hard disk (from HD).

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Poor_Mans_Install