Hello all, and of course a Linux question

[pknox]

Hello! I am looking to install an XP/Linux dual boot system, and was wondering if it would be possible to satisfy the following conditions with Linux in general, and if this satisfaction is limited only to certain distros. My PC is a lower end model (Intel Celeron D 2.66 GHz, 512MB RAM, 80GB HDD, relatively crappy "Intel Extreme Graphics 3d", which is an i845 to the best of my knowledge).

1. I would like to dual boot, and have the default choice be XP; i.e. if no choice is made in x seconds, the boot process will continue on to XP (the ability to modify x would be a nice bonus). This is mostly due to my wife, who also uses the pc, and thinks linux is the peanuts character with the blanket, and thus couldn't be bothered.

2. I, like everyone else, have mp3s and videos on my hard drive, in my "My Documents" folder. I would love to have access to these both in Windows and LInux. I realize this may require some creative partitioning - at first I'm wondering if it's possible, but I'd also love to hear how it can be done (assuming of course it is possible).

3. I have an ipod shuffle; my wife has a nano. I have used a shuffle with Linux before and it seemed OK...would the nano still work, given the menu structure on the device?

4. I have a blackberry (8700c) - is it possible to synchronize via Linux? - this is not a deal breaker, but I am curious.

5. I have played around a bit with Linux (Ubuntu (7.04, 7.10)and SUSE (10.2,10.3) mostly), and realize that the onboard graphics makes things a pain. I'd love to run at 1280x1024. Are particular distros better than others (based on experience) with this? I may also alternatively purchase a lower end (PCI) graphics card, thinking nvidia or ati, would anyone recommend any in particular to be more "linux friendly?"

If there are multiple distros that can do this, I'd love to hear recommendations; I'm not so concerned whether something is a deb or rpm, as long as dependency hell is avoided; I would also like to have a decent size repository, and access to "those" tools -- i.e. the ability to play flash, other video formats, et al that are non-open source, as unfortunately I am somewhat dependent on them at the moment. Basically the same stuff that anyone wants. The existence of a distro-specific forum where answeres can be had is a nice plus too, but I'm anticipating Linux Forums may be able to serve that role as well.

Thanks,

Peter Knox

[jayd512]

Hello and Welcome!

First off, all of these things are possible under Linux. And shouldn't be much trouble at all. The first thing I would do is proceed with the installation, then move on to each of the other criteria in what ever order you choose. Of course, you'll have help here if you need! What distro are you looking into, by the way? Your system specs shouldn't be a problem at all for any of the modern flavors.
1) Install XP first. Then Linux as the Linux installer will see XP and will guide you through setting up dual-boot accordingly. And setting the default OS/time to boot is not at all difficult.

2) Accessing your Windows files from your Linux install can be done as well. You'll just have to mount the drive to do so. Again, we can guide you through it when we come to it.

3) iPods have given Linux users the occasional fit, and I don't own anything by Apple (no slur towards them... just a 'me' thing) but shouldn't be a major issue.

4) Bluetooth and/or wired USB syncing of a PDA is becoming more standard these days in Linux. For example, Fedora tries to load it by default!

5) Your Intel Graphics that you currently have will work just fine for that resolution, but if you do decide to get a newer card, I would suggest nVidia as they have extremely good support for Linux OS's.

Pretty much all of us here on the Forums likes to watch some YouTube or throw in a DVD, with all kinds of different distros, so there's really not a specific one to advise. Some of the ones that are considered newbie-friendly would be Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuSE, Mint and PCLinuxOS. There are, of course, others. And all of those have large software repos that should meet all of your needs.

Let us know which distro you decide on. See you on the boards!

[pknox]

Thanks!

Great info all around. As to what distro I'm looking at, I'm pretty open. I first got into Linux back when Ubuntu was at 7.04 - I want to say that's a year ago? I actually liked Ubuntu, especially the automatic update feature -- unfortunately, when the update to 7.10 went through, my system became basically unusable. I then tested pretty much every distro I could get a hand on, and was able to successfully install SUSE, which seemed OK. Never did get debian to install, and BSD worked, but the repositories (I know they're actually a different system, but I can't remember what they're called - I want to say ports, but I might be thinking gentoo) didn't seem to. Fedora seemed slow for my hardware, and some distros didn't seem to handle 1280x1024. Having been away for a bit (but still reading the magazines) it seems a lot has changed over the year or so. Looks like it's time to check out distrowatch again, and make more live CD's!

One of the reasons I went to Ubuntu was that partitioning was much less of a hassle, and I didn't have to worry about running out of space. I first started with Mandriva one, and ran out of space quickly because I didn't understand how partitions worked, and went with the default; I ran out of space soon after hitting the repositories. Being a dual boot (and thus with multiple partitions) things will most likely be different this time. Are basically all of the distros equivalent as far as their ease of partitioning (and "awareness" of XP) or do any in particular stand out? I remember hearing once that SUSE makes it easier to accidently delete your XP partition, but I'm not sure how true that is, and with new versions (especially upgrades to the left of the decimal) the game may very well have changed.

I actually am pretty sympathetic with you as far as the ipod; the shuffle was a gift - I currently use mediamonkey as itunes is really too much bloatware for me. I may end up buying an mp3 player somewhere down the line, as I'd love a menu system and album art on a device (plus more than 1 GB). Any recommendations as to which mesh well with Linux? I was thinking a zune may not work because of it's m-soft roots, but I may be mistaken.

Thanks again - it's great and timely info like this that make these forums so cool.

[jayd512]

As far as slowing down a system, any distro can do that depending on what you have running. I do understand what you mean about Fedora, however, as Fedora 8 is residing on my other drive. But you can step up the performance a bit by looking into some of the lighter Window managers. Link. And for seeing XP, pretty much all the ones I mentioned in my above post will play nice with other OS's on partitioning and booting.
Really, I would say that you have the right idea with LiveCD's. You'll be able to find most tyypes of hardware issues without having to worry about the full install right up front.
And screen resolution isn't much of a problem so long as you have the right set-up (again, not hard to do!)

[pknox]

Thanks again. I've just downloaded the .iso for Ubuntu 8.10, and plan to dl the latest versions of the following others:

Fedora
SuSE
Mandriva
Debian (why not another try, right?)
PcLinuxOS
BSD (either Free, Desktop, Open, or PC - will do research - BSD has always intrigued me)
Perhaps Mint - seems to me to be Ubuntu with stuff attached - I may as well dl Ubuntu and attach the stuff myself, but green is my favorite color
Perhaps CentOS - interesting as it seems more Red Hat-like, but Fedora may actually serve my needs better as I am not an enterprise user.

I have a final paper due Saturday, so I will not play until after then. Should be a fun weekend! I'll update you guys as best as I can (and prob will need to ask a question or so as well, so it is most likely inevitable).

[jayd512]

Perhaps Mint - seems to me to be Ubuntu with stuff attached - I may as well dl Ubuntu and attach the stuff myself, but green is my favorite color

A pretty good description of it. Mint is heavily based on Ubuntu.

Perhaps CentOS - interesting as it seems more Red Hat-like, but Fedora may actually serve my needs better as I am not an enterprise user.

To be a little more specific, CentOS is actually a direct clone of the source code that goes into RHEL, only free because you're not getting enterprise support.

Looking forward to hearing how it goes!

[jmadero]

I'd sell the ipod and go for a Creative Zen....my mom has an Ipod and it gave me such a headache to get it working in Ubuntu....I'm a fairly experienced user and it took me about 3 hours to figure everything out, replacing files on the ipod, etc....

But if that's not an option, I'd definitely say try Ubuntu first, it might lag a big because it's a heftier distro but for a first time user, it's easier than most. It also has a lot of help and support so for instance:

google "ipod shuffle Ubuntu how to" and you'll get a lot of stuff that will probably help. The problem with ipods is that they keep changing the firmware so each time brilliant developers have to reverse engineer a solution for gtpod and rythmbox/amarok etc....

the creative zen is really good with Ubuntu, it seems like, althoug they don't provide the code, they don't openly try to prevent you from choosing your own OS, they also look nicer

[pknox]

Ah. Finished the papers early, so I get to play!

I was able to make liveCDs for Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, Mandriva, and CentOS. A new version of PCLOS is coming out soon, so I figured I'd wait; I couldn't get a liveCD version for Debian (but Ubuntu should serve that purpose), and couldn't find a live version of BSD that was also installable.

Unfortunately, I was unable to load CentOS at all, or Fedora past the automatic login screen. I think this might have to do with the i845, as others have had problems as well. This may be compiz related, as Ubuntu had the same problem, but kicking out to a shell and using sudo apt-get to remove compiz-core let me run Ubuntu. Kind of strange, as SuSE has compiz on by default according to the package manager. Might be a gnome+compiz thing, as the three distros I had problems with were all gnome based. If there is a way to disable compiz at boot through modification of the boot options, I may get farther, which would be nice, as I'd like to experiment a bit with these distros.

Looking at SuSE and Mandriva, KDE 4.0 looks pretty sweet, but seems rather unstable, and more so with SuSE. As 11.1 comes out in a few days, it may be worth the wait.

I'm going to see if I can dl some other gnome-based distros and determine if that's the true problem. I also downloaded a copy of Dreamlinux, which I can run with XFCE or gnome.

I'll see what else I can find, try to see what I can do about the gnome-based distro, and keep playing with the KDE-based ones.

Perhaps if I get a "real" video cad relatively soon, my options open up a bit.

The Zen does look pretty cool, btw.

[pknox]

Ah. Finished the papers early, so I get to play!
I'll see what else I can find, try to see what I can do about the gnome-based distro, and keep playing with the KDE-based ones.

Interestingly enough...

I thought perhaps this might be a Gnome problem, as opposed to a video driver one, so I downloaded Kubuntu and the KDE version of Fedora. I also downloaded the final RC of Open SuSE 11.1 (KDE), as I'd like to try the newer KDE (and get a taste of what's coming in a couple of days). Neither Kubuntu or Fedora worked; Kubuntu failed at KDE 4.1 startup (at the icon that looks like a screen - 4th one I believe, right after the globe - and Fedora froze up at the screen that had "Fedora" with a progress line underneath it. After playing with Open SuSE 11.1 (which is quite slick; the KDE seems more stable, at least to me), I then tried the Gnome version of 11.1, and it actually worked (I'm posting this from within the Gnome Live session). I haven't tried 11.0 Gnome so I can't make a direct comparison vs. 11.1 Gnome, but there probably isn't a need, with 11.1 coming out in a couple of days. This led me to believe that the problem isn't a Gnome one, but instead a distro one.

At this point I do like the SuSE release - it seems rather polished, and also includes Version 3.0 of Open Office, which is nice. The Gnome version was able to recognize my HDD as soon as I clicked the home folder (it automatically mounted upon being clicked) - I believe KDE did the same thing, but I'll have to check - I know either 11.0 or 11.1 threw an "unknown error", but I can't remember which -- that's what I get for testing distros at 2 am I am most likely getting a video card after the first of the year, so I may hold off so I can give Fedora and Ubuntu a fair shake -- I am especially anxious to try Fedora since I've never used it. At this point, having used Ubuntu in the past, I don't see it displacing SuSE for me - I did like it, but I do remember a good deal of instability (again, for me, not looking to start a war here) when the updates arrived. Heron was basically the reason I had to go back to XP, as it made my system unusable. It's really nice that Ubuntu allows automatic upgrades through taskbar notification, but not when it doesn't work.

BTW, as far as the video card goes, I am thinking of an ATI Radeon 2400 Pro - my understanding is that the Radeon cards are pretty OK for Linux; is that accurate? Having only a PCI slot (not PCI-e) my choices are admittedly somewhat limited. I did see a GeForce 8400 as well (taking the nVidia recommendations to heart, and wanting to help out those who help Linux) but my concern is that I only have a 280w power supply, and the 8400 wants a 300w -- I'm not sure how critical that is.

[jayd512]

All of the little issues you mentioned could be just a hardware thing. Can you boot with a LiveCD? If so, execute

lspci

Post the output here.