You can buy recovery media off your PCs manufacturer, but you may not be able to (because im guessing the machine is a few years old if its running xp, and microsoft is limiting XP distribution now)....

No. The recovery media may or may not be a full windows cd (else it will be a customised windows cd from your manufacturer with all sorts of other stuff on it).

The recovery console is an optional...

Do you have an option to create such a CD in your start menu? If not, then i advise you against installing linux or indeed any other operating system.

The liveCD is just as easy if not more.

Just boot the disk. Ubuntu will start (may be slow thats normal as its running entirely off the cd at this time). Try it and see if you like it. Click the...

That CPU definately supports 64 bit. The only thing that i could forsee causing any issues is the video (ati support out of the box in linux isnt too good).

Why not just install the "normal" way...

No. You can install GRUB to non-hdd locations e.g a floppy, if you want to. Also you can use NTLDR (the windows bootloader) to boot linux. A bit of a pain, but a bit easier in recent (vista/7)...

What model CPU do you have.

Karmic is very buggy compared to jaunty, it seems a bit rushed to me - there are quite a number of regressions caused by changes to the kernel (KMS mainly), specifically, of you have an intel video...

do


sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential

you can tell the installer where to put it, its usually hidden under some menu called advanced or something.

Unetbootin doesnt make it persistant anyway, it just makes it bootable, the same as a normal live or install CD, anything you do with it is lost upon reboot.

I dont think mandriva-seed supports...

Well, first thing, install make and gcc and other tools needed for compiling


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential


Then you can do make and make install to install...

Ive just installed OpenSuse 11.2

Hated 11.1 (the package management was crap beyond belief) but 11.2 keeps all the good bits and none of the bad. Liking it so far (using GNOME btw)

Doesnt support my wireless card and has issues with the backlight on my laptop. And i need Office 2007 document support.

On thier bugzilla there are ~200 reports about it. Crashes with python errors around 60% of the time if you try and do anything other than the defaults e.g install GRUB to another disk, set GRUB...

The server edition is 64 bit. Do you have a 64 bit compatible CPU?

no i mean with regards to video. Intel chipsets and Plymouth KMS dont mix

yes, it looks quite promising. not a big KDE4 fan though, so will be giving GNOME a go. proceeding with caution though, as i have an intel chipset and my machine hates both the new ubuntu and fedora

fedora 11s installer is crap. Crashes all the time during partitioning, generally bricking windows in the process. fedora is so buggy.

Use Debian "Stable" (currently "Lenny" 5.0.3 ). Use the "testing" repositories instead if you want a more up-to-date desktop system, its generally pretty safe (do NOT use "testing" on a server, as...

Debian because its easier to keep patched in my opinion and it has lots of software available.

Better hardware support for wireless cards, video cards, laptops etc makes it better for home users.

MS ran hotmail on FreeBSD between 1996 and 2003. Worked fine for them.

Yahoo also (still) run on FreeBSD as do big names like Sony, the Apache foundation and Netcraft.

I agree that it indeed an...

Yes, thats what I did, installed then patched a system in VirtualBox and then installed the resulting image on a real machine

You know whats awesome. Build an ubuntu (or whatever) system in a VM then use a tool called Remastersys which can create an installable livecd from a currently running system e.g i install and update...

Same. And Kubuntu isnt lighter (if anything, Kubuntu is heavier) - maybe you mean Xubuntu?

Use a better distribution? It works fine on other distributions, its just fedora 11s just seems to crash all the time (partitioner worked only 1 out of 5 times for me)

I like fedora but had a crap experience with 11. Its installer crashed constantly unless you chose the defaults (showed how little testing they did - try setting a GRUB password, then renaming an OS...

Is this Fedora 11? Fedora 11's partitioner is hideously buggy...

If you have already shrunk your windows partition, just choose "install into free space" and it will automatically make a swap and a / partition of you of the size it sees fit.

yep, centOS is a free rebuild of RHEL but its a crap choice for a server (peoplke say its great - read on to see why i disagree)

1) No support. if you are running a misssion-critical business...

For one thing, redhat 9 is very very old and not supported any more.

What version of ubuntu are you trying?

Yeah i think you type "linux rescue" at the boot: prompt on the cd.

That will give you a console where you can chroot into your system and rerun grubinstall.

Ubuntu and Debian are very similar except debian uses less bleeding-edge versions, making it more stable, but sadly meaning it doesnt have the latest and greatest features and hardware support. Only...

I like some of Fedora 11 but it seems very buggy. The installer crashed on me repeately and package management seems slow. The upside was it detected all my H/W and fixed some annoying bugs I had...

Yeah but like i said, it doesnt matter. You can always let it use the whole disk, then shrink the windows parition (either with its disk management menu, or with a recent linux distribution) ,...

Check out Distrowatch
http://distrowatch.com/

It has a search feature, news about upcoming releases, and links to the projects pages and download mirrors.

It doesnt matter if vista uses the whole HDD initially as vista now allows you to shrink NTFS partitions under Disk Management

You may need additional libaries etc... Try "winetricks" to get these.



I didnt really want to, but it site policy and annoyingly the "keep it legal" reason has no option to give just a...

Multimedia codec support is a pain in the ass under linux (and in most countries its technically illegal to watch most store-baught DVDs under it)



Did you botther to read the post? he was...