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Re: I Don't Have to Use Windows



At 07:46 PM 8/1/01 -0700, Paul O. Johnson wrote:
I plan to switch to Linux whenever I can get up the nerve.

You don't have to do it cold turkey!

You can easily have a dual-boot system, i.e. one that boots linux if you
want and boots windoze if/when you want.

My laptop is dual-boot. It's been eons since I actually booted it into
windoze, but when I'm travelling it's comforting to know that I _could_
boot into windoze if I needed to -- perhaps to deal with an attachment that
somebody sends me.

There's one slight catch: installing linux is harder than just plain using
linux -- and a dual-boot installation is more obscure than a regular
installation. It's not terrible -- ordinary mortals can figure it out --
but I consider it an unfairly harsh lesson, especially if it's your first
lesson in dealing with a new OS. The obvious suggestion is to find a
friend who has some linux experience who will sit with you during the
installation. It shouldn't be toooo hard to find someone; there are more
linux boxes than Macs out there. The last I looked linux had 5% of the
desktop market and 25% of the server market (and growing).

Also, FWIW, here's the lilo.conf file from one of my machines. The last
stanza ("other") is the one that tells lilo how to boot win2k. You would
change "sda" to "hda" everywhere if your machine has IDE disks (as opposed
to SCSI disks).

##########################
boot=/dev/sda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
linear
default=linux

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.2-2
label=old-linux
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.2-2.img
read-only
root=/dev/sdb1

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.6
label=linux
read-only
root=/dev/sdb1

other=/dev/sda1
label=win2k
table=/dev/sda
################################