More Linux at Work

[charlie bullen]

Good Morning, 

I have a real opportunity here. I have been using linux as my desktop for 
about 6 weeks with good results. The owner of the company, Dave, wants me to 
install linux on his copmuter which is a Dell Inspiron running windows XP 
professional. It will be a dual boot. Plenty of room on hard drive. Dave is a 
very expirienced Unix and linux server user, but all his expierience is from 
the command line, he's never used X at all.

I have resized hard drives on systems running Window 95 and 98 using fips (i 
think that's the name, comes with all distros I have used) will this work the 
same way on windows XP? Any forseeable problems? 

Can I expect problems with his modem?

Ive never installed linux on a laptop before, any particular problems I can 
expect? I watched the fellow from Redhat install Redhat 7.3 on a Dell laptop 
at the install fest and there were no problems at all, but he did nothing 
with the moden, using the nic for internet connectivity.

Personally I mainly use Suse, currently 8.0 but all our linux servers here are 
Redhat. Also we are planning on a K12LTSP installation soon so I'm leaning 
towards either redhat 7.3 or just installing the K12LTSP installation which 
is based on Redhat 7.3 anyway.  I want him to have OpenOffice and K12LSTP 
installs that by default. Any recomendations would be appreciated.

I feel that it is real important to get this to work perfectly as it has been 
sort of a battle here, first to get permission for me to use linux and then 
to get it working with some of our proprietaty stuff. This is the next 
battle, to convince the owner by his own expierience that linux is viable as 
a desktop for general office users.

Regards,


Charlie