Fedora dual boot

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On January 29, 2005 07:39, Simon Tonekham wrote
> One more question that i'm concerned of, The problem is, if I'm not
> comfortable on having Linux on my system, how do I remove the shared
> partition (the FAT32 partition) and the GRUB boot loader that goes with it?
> How do I restore my system back to it's original state after removing Linux
> off my system? 

I am surprised no one else has mentioned this so I will. Please stop sending 
HTML mail to the list. It is really annoying to see all that raw HTML (ugly 
to boot) just for a few lines of text. Yes, I can view HTML if I wanted to in 
KMail but I have it disabled to not display by default as it often contains 
executable content. (I wonder why this list server is not set up to strip 
HTML junk from messages.) Also, please trim messages so that at the very 
least you get rid of the message footer inserted by the list server. To your 
credit, at least you bottom post.

Now, to your questions. It seems to me that if you are just interested in 
trying Linux and are not certain that you will keep it on your machine, you 
may be better served by trying one of the live Linux distros. A live Linux 
distro will boot and run from the CD without touching your hard disk drive. 
It is much more usable than it may seem if you have sufficient RAM as Linux 
caches things aggressively. Of course applications will not launch as quickly 
as they would from the hard disk but with a reasonably fast CDROM, it is 
hardly objectionable. They can all mount your hard disk partition(s), though 
many will mount them as read only for safety reasons. You will have to 
explicitly mount your disk partition(s) as read/write to be able to save 
anything to the disk. This presumes you have FAT32, not NTFS. NTFS write 
support is experimental. Of course you can save on things like USB keys too.

Using a live Linux CD, you do not have to intall on your hard disk at all and 
you can still get a good feel for what Linux is like. If you like it, you can 
then decide which distro to install and how.

I do not not know of Fedora based live CDs, though they probably exist. The 
most popular of the live Linux distros is Knoppix 
<http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html>. It has excellent hardware 
support, probably the best hardware detection of *any* OS, including Windows, 
and is based on Debian so it uses apt-get for package management. The Knoppix 
motto seems to be "all the Linux you can cram on a CD". Knoppix has spawned 
an entire ecosystem of live CD distros that are based upon it, like Morphix 
and others. It is well supported at #knoppix on FreeNode.

Mandrake Move <http://www.mandrakelinux.com/> is the live CD version of one of 
the most polished Linux distros, Mandrake Linux. I use Mandrake Linux on 
desktop machines and servers. You can download it free from one of the 
mirrors here: <http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/ftp.php3>. It is well 
supported at #mandrake on FreeNode.

PCLinuxOS <http://www.pclinuxonline.com/pclos/> is based on Mandrake and 
targets the desktop user. It is more of a hybrid though as it used Debian's 
apt-get for package management to manage RPMs, which I find rather weird. It 
also uses the same hardware detection package as Knoppix. IRC support is at 
#pclinuxos on EFnet.

SimplyMepis < http://www.mepis.com/> is another Debian based distro. It seems 
to have quite a following but it left me somewhat cold as I could not find 
source for one of the KDE packages and my question to the developer list went 
unanswered.

Vida Linux <http://gentoo.vidalinux.com/> is based on Gentoo. I have not tried 
this one but it looks interesting.

Slax <http://slax.linux-live.org/> is a Slackware based live Linux that is 
about as minimal as one can find with for a KDE based system and in contrast 
to all of the above, is svelte.

If you have a broadband connection, download and burn them all. CDs are cheap 
and you will be able to try them all without making a long term commitment.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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