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Subject:Re: What notebook did you buy? From:David Neeley <dbneeley -at- gmail -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 12 Apr 2005 17:52:39 -0500
A boot loader resides in the very first bytes on the drive, where the
hardware looks to determine what to do first. Instead of the Windows
loader (which, last I heard, could also be used to boot more operating
systems than Windows but is somewhat flaky), you would use another
one, probably GRUB (the "Grand Unified Bootloader" if memory serves).
This would present a menu of operating system choices as you boot the
machine, but would default to your primary if you made no choice
before some pre-determined number of seconds.
Windows can't read the usual filesystems for Linux, so a Linux
partition is invisible to it and will not interfere with Windows in
the slightest. Notebook hard drives are now available up to at least
100 GB, so multiple partitions from a size standpoint should be no
problem.
I would not, however, run multiple versions of Windows on the same
machine as a general rule.
To me, running NT4 would be devoutly to be avoided if possible. It is
just so flaky that you invite problems, particularly on new hardware
since it is very likely that appropriate drivers won't any longer be
available for NT4 for all devices.
The latest Novell iteration, by the way, offers a choice of a Netware
kernel or a Linux kernel with the same services for both of them.
Setting up a machine to run XP, Linux, and Novell is normally fairly
simple using the bootloader as I mentioned.
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