Any of you guys run linux?

Does it have anything to do with the /boot partition being in a file system other than FAT and NTFS, so then the win xp wouldn't work on bootup?

I think you're confusing /boot with the Master Boot Record, MBR, where the first-stage bootloader is installed. Incidentally, the MBR doesn't exactly have a file system.

My /boot partition is ext2, and WinXP loads just fine from GRUB.

Sometimes, the MBR is protected (via the BIOS, in most cases).

But be careful with the MBR ! : Once it's ruined, your whole HD is gone ...

I'm having trouble dual booting. I have win xp on there. I want to put fedora linux on also. When I install fedora, should I install grub bootloader? If yes, where should I put the grub bootloader? On the MBR or on the first partition after the MBR? Also, I have a raid0 already setup prior to installing win xp. Do I need to do anything else that has to do with a raid during the fedora linux installation like on the partition screen?

Install GRUB on the MBR (NTLoader only loads Windows), it will then put its second stage loader in /boot by default. I have no experience with raid setups, so I can't tell for certain, but if it's hardware raid you shouldn't need to do anything special, I think it should all be abstracted away.

Dual-booting between Windows XP and Kubuntu. Most of what I need works greats great on Kubuntu, but if I need anything which is windows-centric (I.E. Games) I can boot into XP. WINE is too much of a PITA to get working.

For some reason Fedora Linux freezes during installation.

I have win xp installed with 300 gigs of unpartitioned space left over. I install fedora linux on that 300 gigs and I tell it to install grub bootloader on the MBR, then while it's installing the packages it freezes at the very beginning. I have a feeling it's my raid0. I set up the raid0 before I installed win xp so it's a hardware raid. This is really wierd. I ran a media test on the fedora linux install cd and it passed fine. Any ideas?

Also, let's say fedora linux did install. What do I need to do afterwards so that I can get a menu at bootup to select win xp for fedora?

I think the install program should have some parameters you can give it in kind of a command line.

At least I know this from Knoppix and Ubuntu.
Don't know how it is with Fedora.

In a different forum I read that a freeze was happening because of Fedora not properly detecting the monitor, thus going black.

I use Ubuntu Server LTS (6.04) on an older PC that I use as a router and small file server. I also triple boot my main desktop between XP Pro(actually this will go away now, since The Witcher has a crack now, I HATE CP!), win2k, and latest Ubuntu(settled on it a few years after trudging through many distros).

I have a set of games that if they play well under wine I'll use them under linux, e.g. NWN1 linux, X2 linux, Minions of Mirth under wine, etc. Actually alot6 of the games that wine will run seem to run better/faster under linux + wine, plus if they crash it doesn't take down the whole OS, or none have managed to cause a kernel panic yet.

I also do alot of my web browsing, and usenetting from under linux as the news clients work better for me, and I have tinkered with some of them to add or extend some features, plus the CLI on linux is actually useful v. Windows(useless mostly).

Mostly, I use windows for gaming though as wine is usually slow to support games, and usually only big games get quick support, e.g. WoW plus I made my linux partitions a little too small (time for another drive).

[EDIT]
Oh yeah, another thing about using linux/wine for windows games is that they usually require a cracked version for best compatibility o.w. they'll either just not run or crash alot. Also anything that uses PINVOKE .net commands will NOT run, and likely will never run unless they add support for .net. SOME things can be gotten to run using mono, but...
[/EDIT]

A few days ago I re-installed my text processing program called "Textmaker" on my Ubuntu system.

So now the programs which are most important to me are now there: OpenOffice, Textmaker & Mozilla.

Yeah arlik, going back, how I said that the fedora install would freeze while I had a win xp partition on board. It sounds like you were right, the video card being the cause I mean. I just did the text install and it went perfectly. I've been using fedora for quite some time now. I've been getting pretty good at it. I setup a virtual machine with fedora 7 and messed between the two network wise. I got familiar with ftp, ssh, nfs, etc. It's awesome. After learning all the sweet terminal commands like cat file > text.file, it's just awesome. Plus learning the commands, makes you understand many other things. It's like linux terminal commands are the foundation for everything else. I mean, I just understand everything better, undertones, implications, everything, when it comes to computers, like verbose functions etc. I don't know, but I feel soo much more proficient with computers thanks to linux. I love Linux!! Not to mention compiz and beryl desktop effects.

I've been using Linux on and off for years now. My first dual boot computer had Mandrake 9.2 on it, which was a bit quirky, but worked quite well. I have used several versions of Fedora, but I find the post-installation fiddling quite annoying there. Otherwise it's quite good. I had many problems with Ubuntu; somehow, my machines don't like the Ubuntu installers. Funny enough, Linux Mint works fine (very recommended for Linux beginners). I tried Debian, which also needs much post-processing to look like I want to have it, but I managed to break each and every Debian installation I had. I tried Arch Linux, and that one managed to wipe my harddisk.

At the moment, I just have a machine with PCLinuxOS running. It's very easy to install and runs like a champ. Similar to Linux Mint, it installs most proprietary drivers etc. automatically, which is a plus in my book. I want to install NWN on that one, but haven't done so yet (NWN should run natively under Linux).

thartanian said:

I got familiar with ftp, ssh, nfs, etc. It's awesome. After learning all the sweet terminal commands like cat file > text.file, it's just awesome. Plus learning the commands, makes you understand many other things. It's like linux terminal commands are the foundation for everything else.

Click to expand...

Yes, many GNU/Linux GUI-programs are really just graphical shells on top of command-line programs. If you want to know more about how to use the shell: Try the Advanced BASH-scripting Guide.

Long ago, a teacher (during my training) said that [in his opinion] "DOS is nothing more than a poor unix".

The more I learned about the Linux commands, the more I learned that he was (and still is) right. Except that nowadays almost no-one uses DOS anymore.

Not surprising, as it started out as "QDOS", Quick and Dirty Operating System, which was slung together in six weeks. It didn't even have a tree structured file system.

Yes, I know.

Wikipedia has good articles about this stuff.

I just saw the movie, The Pirates of Silicon Valley, about beginning careers of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I never knew that Bill Gates stole the software from Apple. Never knew that Xerox was the one that made the gui. I really dislike microsoft now hehe. If only Steve Jobs hadn't done all that lsd, he would have been on top, hehe j/k. I mean, I don't know how accurate the movie really is about Steve Job's personality, but damn, if he was only more practical and not so spiritual he probably would've seen what Bill Gates was up to. In either case, I might add a MacOS to my already dual boot system (WinXP and Fedora) system just to pay homage. Well, Xerox really deserves all the credit, cause it was the gui that made the pc user friendly.

thartanian said:

Well, Xerox really deserves all the credit, cause it was the gui that made the pc user friendly.

Click to expand...

New user friendly (or, approachable), perhaps, but I'd call the common GUI implementations rather power-user unfriendly. The Ion window manager creator wrote a little essay on the subject of usability vs approachability.

My favorite window managers are the dynamic, tiling ones (meaning that the window manager actually manages the windows, not just displays them), such as WMII (this one is capable of some really cool stuff, but you need scripting or programming skills to really take advantage of it) or Awesome (has a common configuration file).

Also, how would you install MacOS on a PC? I suppose it's possible with some hacking, but it would break the EULA.

Those window managers look pretty sweet. I'm definitely gonna look into them. As for a MacOS, yeah I forgot about that. I've never had a Mac, but I just figured all you needed was the hardware and then the os. I thought it was all universal. So macs have their own unique motherboard, processors, ram, and video card? Or by installing a macOS on a custom build would be breaking the EULA?

Macs don't use BIOS, but EFI instead, otherwise, they're practically identical since Apple switched to Intel processors from IBM's PowerPC ones.

There's also a clause in the MacOS EULA that says you're not allowed to install it on hardware that doesn't come from Apple.