Hello, hello, hello. I was wondering if anyone could answer this silly question for me. I've been playing around with linux for quite sometime now and I've destroyed and revived my laptop countless times already. My original intention is to setup a dual-boot with my xp and in the same drive allocate a space for linux. Now I have Xp runnig in the bigger space of the drive but I left our about 8 Gb for linux. I wanted to try several distro on that space and my question is if I install a particular distro and then later decide I fancy to try another one will it confuse the boot loader? Where does the boot loader reside anyway (MBR?) And lastly, why do I have to keep a swap memory twice of my RAM? Thank you for the help. I know they're annoying newbie questions. Good day. Btw, if this is relevant to help you answer my question, I'm using an IBM Thinkpad T30 P4m with 1GB RAM and 20 GB HDD.

The boot loader resides where you want it to. Go to my website (follow the Homepage link) and look up dual / triple booting procedures for a full answer. In short you have three options : Option 1 - Use NT Boot loader to control the two OSes (I use this method). This requires the Linux bootloader to be installed in the partition where /boot reesides. You will also need to create a linux boot floppy in this method. This is explained fully in my website. Option 2 - You can let the linux boot loader install itself in the master boot record in which case it controls the boot up process. You then have a choice of using GRUB or LILO as the Linux boot loader. Option 3 - You can use a third party boot manager such as boot magic. If you want to try installing different versions of Linux then the best option is to use the NT boot loader method and ensure that you do NOT allow linux to load its boot loader in the MBR. As I said this before this does mean that for a short, while until you set up the NT boot loader to allow you to boot linux, you will need a boot floppy to boot up linux. You can however, elect to let linux load its boot loader in the MBR. This will also work as subsequent install of the different flavours of linux you try will overwrite the MBR with the new boot loader. So as they say the choice is yours. Regarding SWAP space, Windows can manage its own swap space. However, it is believed, that by fixing the swapspace to a multiple of your RAM size, it makes windows run more efficiently. The value of 2 times your RAM size is a widely accepted convention. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

People are nice. Thanks man. I'll go over your website and decide later on which option to use. If you say that the boot loader will be overwritten whenever I install a new flavour, I don't think I'll have a problem then.

I prefer the 4th option. When you install the Linuxes, always select that the bootloader (lilo or grub) be placed on diskette. You should be able to set up the bootloader so that XP and Linux can be dual booted. Do not modify the MBR until you have selected your favorite linux/bsd version and things are working smoothly I always boot from diskette.

Re size of swap: http://wombat.san-francisco.ca.us/faqomatic/cache/53.html