On Fri, 2005-04-15 at 07:49 -0700, mike enriquez wrote:
> I was gutless! I install xp then installed Mandrake. I guess I would
> like to try what you suggested maybe next time. I would like to get my
> experience up to where I feel comfortable poking around with the boot
> loader but I am not there yet.
> Thanks
> Mike the newbie 
> 
----
In essence - it really doesn't matter how you handle the bootloader -
there are many ways to do it.

Basically, the last install will write the boot loader to the main hard
drive and if that last install is Linux, then it 'should' automatically
detect the Windows installation and create the bootloader entry for you
where as if Windows XP were the last to be installed, it would ignore
any Linux boot volumes and you would have to create those yourself by
editing the 'C:\boot.ini' file - more effort but when you get it
working, the effect is much the same.

Linux offers a choice between grub and lilo and there are other 3rd
party mechanisms such as Partition Magic but those have been slow to
respond to the newer filesystems on Linux such as ext3 so they don't
make much sense to me to use in 'dual-boot' setups and for obvious
reasons, they tend to be Windows centric and may do things in a less
than optimal way for Linux.

Generally, I discourage dual-boot setups unless it is a laptop. Given
the low cost of desktop computers and kvm devices, you could share the
keyboard, mouse and monitor between 2 desktop computers and have both a
Windows and a Linux machine available at a button press. Also a cifs or
smbfs mount of the directories of a 'running' Windows machine are easier
to get at than ntfs modules which really don't let you write files from
Linux - thus, if you want to pass documents back and forth between a
Linux and Windows dual-boot system, you really want to have a separate
fat/vfat partition for your documents that can easily be written to by
both boot systems. I also think that many people will revert to Windows
because they think they understand it better and will be less inclined
to boot into Linux and use Linux on the dual-boot. Lastly, I know that
my understanding of Linux shot up once I committed to using it full-
time.

Craig

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