Thinkpads Forum

have a newbie question for you linux experts...

i'm thinking of dual installing Red Hat Linux onto thinkpad T42 with pre-loaded Win'XP.

so what is the best strategy?

eg:
C:\ drive==>must this be FAT32 file system instead of NTFS, so that Linux can read this C:\ drive?

what is the best partitioning strategy?

any other extra programs/drivers that are specifically needed by IBM Thinkpad T42, especially for the video/modem/CD-RW ?

your insights would be greatly appreciated!

The C:\ drive does not have to be fat32 as long as you do not have to read/write to it.
If you don't want to lose your current installation I would suggest resizing your NTFS partition to allow a 10 gig linux partition, a 512 meg swap partition and a 15 gig D:\ partition formatted to fat32 and it can be the "storage" partition for both Windows and Linux. Just download and save your files to the D:\ drive and they will be accessable to both OS'es. Another benefit to this is that if you ever have to reinstall either OS you will not lose your data.
Make sure when you partition that Windows is in the first partition, Linux and its swap partition is in the middle and the fat32 partition is on the end so windows can accurately see the size of the physical drive.

If you use Software which changes the MBR like IBM Rescue and Recovery or Safeguard Easy don't install grub in the MBR. There is a guide at the famous gentoo forums how to keep the XP bootloader and installing grub to /boot partition:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php? ... otsect+lnx

By the way: the first linux distro where my Atheros IBM a/b card was working out of the box was ubuntu linux, a brand new debian based distro. Really very nice and polished (www.ubuntulinux.org).

I kept my XP ntfs partition, resized it (Partition Magic or Acronis Disktool) and created a fat32 exchange partition where I have installed my email and bookmark data so I can access both with XP and Linux (easy to do with opera or firefox and thunderbird).

in a single HDD I have WXP pro and FC1 with NTFS and ext3. It works fine.

I use Ubuntu because everything just works. Ati drivers and wireless are fine. What I did was keep the windows ntldr on the mbr, and just did a raw dump of my /boot partition and editted my boot.ini.

I first resized my windows parition to 15gb, created a 30 gb fat32 partition for music/movies/email sharing, and I created an extended partition in the remaining space. /boot (/dev/hda5) was 50mb, swap (/dev/hda6) was a gig, and / (/dev/hda7) was the rest (I will probably go into more depth partitioning next time I install, but for now this works fine). I installed ubuntu, installed grub (because you dont need to do as much configuration) on /dev/hda5 and let the machine reboot. I then booted using a knoppix live cd, mounted the fat32 partition as /files, then did the follow command: I then booted into windows, moved ubuntu.bin to my c:\ drive, and added: c:\ubuntu.bin="Ubuntu (Linux)" to the end of my boot.ini.

Theres a guide similiar to what I did here http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/gr ... HOWTO.html

Also, Ubuntu supports the wireless and ati drivers almost out of the box... I updated to the newest kernel build 'apt-get install linux-image-2.6.8.1-3-686' and then used 'apt-get install fglrx-driver' after killing x to installing the ati drivers.

Wow!

Thank you very much for everyone's insights!

It seems as though ubuntu will even send you a free cd at no cost.

Heres the URL for those interested:

http://shipit.ubuntulinux.org/

Heres a review:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/9/28/211242/712

Depending on how much you use Linux versus Windows, you might consider a VM solution. You can download a 45-day trial of Microsoft's Virtual PC and run Linux inside of that. Then your Linux partition is simply a file to XP. The two machines will also appear to be on the same network so you can share files that way.

If you run Linux more, you can run XP on top of it using VMWare.

whizkid wrote:If you run Linux more, you can run XP on top of it using VMWare.

You could do that however unless things have changed, you may have lots of difficulty running windows recovery tools and stuff on a Linux Host/Windows guest configuration where the Windows file system is embedded in a single huge file inside of Linux.

I saw an early version of VMWare (prior to 4.5) where we tested this and the IT guy didn't shut down Windows cleanly before shutting down Linux, and his Windows install got corrupted. Nasty...

-Kevin

Is that unique to a Linux host? I have run every version of VMware from 1 forward to 4.5 in production now and 5 in limited beta on Windows hosts, and I have never had a speck of trouble with Windows guests or Linux guests in terms of corruption. Of course, I have the standard issues with guests as I do with hosts ... JDHurst

If I remember correctly, VMWare is rather expensive? 200 bucks for 4.5.2 ?

May be more cost effective to buy another drive......