Please! Please! Help me XXX :) I'm looking for current info on dual booting XP Pro & Mandrake 9, the best way to do this/ what not to do... I will be building this new PC next weekend (specs:- Asus A7V8X, ATI 9700 Commando, AMD 2400+,80gb HD'WD', DVD'16xpioneer', CDRW'HP' + floppy etc...) I'm very confused as there really does not seem to be many consistent answers. 1)I install XP 1st 'On a logical partition' (this i know) but on a NTSF or Fat32?, as the new Mandrake is different to previous releases. 2) I have the newest version of PM, should I use this? or use Mandrake to resize partitions as it now has support for Linux file ext. 3) I read and understand that I can install Linux on primary or logical partitions, is there any advantage to either way? Yes, a lot of these questions have been asked b4, but I do not seem to get a clear picture for my prefered install. It does not matter to me if XP/Linux can share files, I just want to get used to using Linux for now. I have also read that the iso images are harder to install from is there any truth in this? Thanx in advance for any time spent for helping me. Sam

I'm pretty new to linux, but I'll tell you what worked for me. I installed & loaded WinXP FIRST. I then installed Partition Magic, and created 3 Primary partitions: 1.NTFS for XP, 2.FAT32 for Shared, 3.EXT3 for Linux. (You could skip the second partition if sharing mp3's, pictures and documents isn't important to you). Once that was done, I loaded the Mandrake 9 installer, and there is an option when installing to use the available Linux partition. Select that option, and let it do it's thing. It also installs a nice boot loader tool which lets you choose what OS you want to load. When everythings done, you can access the NTFS & FAT32 Drives in Windows, and the EXT3 and FAT 32drives in Linux /mnt/. (Mandrake also recognized my NTFS partition, but I've read places that is kind of still experimental as of right now). Like I said, I am pretty new myself (This is my second day with Linux, and I've actually switched from Mandrake 9 to Red Hat 8) But I hope this info helps!

Don't do it; Linux support for the mentioned A7V8X isn't ready yet. I bought one yesterday. With the latest 2.4.19 kernel (with a lot of patches from the gentoo distribution), the following need major tweaking: - AGP: no driver - Onboard 10/100 LAN: no driver - Onboard sound: no driver - IDE DMA: after some patching I managed to turn on UDMA on my HDD, with very poor performance (20MB/s, where I managed to get 45MB/s from this disk using my old AMD Irongate chipset on my old Athlon classic) All problems except for the LAN chip originate from the absence of chipset (northbridge and southbride) drivers for the VIA KT400. I gave up for now. I searched the linux-kernel mailing list archives and I saw there is some active development on this chipset, so there will be support in stable kernels soon, I hope.