hi. i have 2 hdd: 1 (80 gb) - with to partitions which on c: i have xp pro, and 2 (20 gb) - on which i have one logical drive (e:), both hdd's works under FAT32 file system. i would like to install on e: drive Linux. my question are: 1-does linux work under fat32? would i be able to see the other drive files under linux? 2-which version of linux should i install? i've heard about "red hat" , "mandriva" , "suse"... 3-would i be able of choosing on boot which windows i would like to boot with? (xp pro or linux?) thanks a lot ahead!!! Some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them

1) GNU/Linux can read and write to FAT fine. FYI NTFS support isn't quite so good. Reading is fine but writing can cause a problem unless you use captive (http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/). 2) It really comes down to personal taste. Some distros may not detect your hardware as well as others and this often helps in making a decision. For a beginner I would recommend one of the main distros like fedora (formally redhat), mandriva (formally mandrake) or suse. Ubuntu (which is based on debian) is getting popular and I have even started rolling it out to some of my users here at work. Before a few of them had mandrake. Another option is to try out some live cd distros and see which one you like. Knoppix (another debian based distro) is probably the best known. Slackware have a live cd called slax which comes in various flavours aimed at multimedia, server etc. Ubuntu has a live cd too and they will ship out discs for free worldwide. They take a little while to come through but you get both a live cd and another to install to your hard drive. Bear in mind that live cd distros run much slower than their hard drive installed versions due to having to constantly accessing the cdrom, but they do give you a flavour without having to install anything to your hard drive. 3) Pretty much all distros these days will detect a windoze install and create an entry for it in your boot loader. Make sure that you create a boot floppy if asked as this can be a lifesaver if you need to re-install xp as windoze will overwrite the linux boot loader without warning (thanx Bill!). You will want to write the linux boot loader (probably either grub or lilo) to your MBR.

first, thanks a lot for the answer. reading those, i came with another question about the MBR: after i read some documentation about Lilo, i was wondering if i would like to delete de linux OS and Lilo, would the MBR will be damaged?, cause on lilo documentation, the uninstall instruction was to fdisk /mbr in order to delete all information of master boot record. if does, the win xp pro which is already installed in my pc, wouldn't boot anymore. so what should i do in order to install linux and lilo, and after deleting them, the currently os and mbr wouldn't be damaged? thankx alot again!!! Some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them

First off "fdisk /mbr" will work on win9x/me machines but not 2000/xp, for that you need to go to the recovery console and type "fixboot" and/or "fixmbr". Installing windoze will also put the windoze boot loader back to your mbr. From within linux you can restore the previous boot loader that was installed prior to lilo with "lilo -u". If uninstalling linux, deleting your linux partitions wont overwrite your mbr. You can completely wipe it with: # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 or to leave the partition table intact: # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1 You will then have to install another boot loader, be it a windoze one, lilo, grub etc or another.

I would like to write a linux newbie manual, who can assist me in this forum? Faruk http://www.geocities.com/afaruk2002

Faruk: You may get more of a response if you start off a new thread asking this. Saying that I'll be happy to help in any way I can (providing I have the time!)

Brian, just to clarify the response to your original question, Linux is able to read and write FAT32 partitions, but most Linux distributions require a UNIX-style filesystem (i.e. ext3, reiserfs, etc.) for the root filesystem. You are then able to mount FAT32 partitions on subdirectories of your root filesystem (typically in something like /mnt/windows). The reason you need a UNIX-style filesystem for your root filesystem is that many packages require certain permissions on their files and FAT32 doesn't support permissions. Hope this answers your first question. J Dieter