Looking for Some Advice

Tilly, Lawrence Lawrence.Tilly at LibertyMutual.com
Tue May 27 09:04:09 EDT 2003


Good morning, all.  

I have a few questions I hope some of you could help me out with.  My place of work is an M$ shop as far as all of our desktops are concerned, however, I spend 90% of my day ssh'd into various Sun, AIX and Linux servers and do very little from a Windoze native point of view (really nothing more than some basic Word/Excel/PPoint).  What started as a joking conversation with one of my managers turned into an approval to pilot and document a dual boot setup on my laptop (report any compatibility problems, issues w/ our network, how often I have to boot W2K to do something I can't under Linux, etc).

I'm pretty excited about this and want to get things going while there's some momentum still (it's amazing how quickly inertia takes its toll in a corporate environment).  All of my significant Linux experience has been with Debian, and all of my installation experience (including a couple W98 dual boot setups with LILO) has been on desktops that I have formatted from scratch for the installation. Here's where I turn to you.  All of our servers running Linux use Red Hat, and I want to do the same since that would stick with the current corporate standard.  Additionally, I want to chop my 18GM drive pretty much in half between W2K and RH, but I have to try to do this without destroying the existing W2K installation, so I'll need to look into a partition splitter (which I have no experience with).  So, here are the categories I would appreciate some help with:

   Partitioning Software:  I need something that can split an 18GB NTFS-formatted drive with minimal risk (I have everything backed up, but it was a major PITA last time I needed to have a reinstall done).  A free solution would be preferred, of course, but if there's a licensed product that's far-and-above superior I'll put in the request.

   Red Hat Linux:  My machine is a Dell Latitude (3 years old, 500mHz, 512MB, ATI Rage Mobility 128 video).  Does anyone have any suggestions as to a good version of RH for a laptop of this vintage?  Is it better to buy a package from the store or am I just as well off downloading and burning the install CDs (I need to make this process as easy to document and duplicate as possible)? I will admit to not following most of the RH specific discussions on this list very closely since I don't run it myself.

   Installed Products:  I will mostly just need a desktop environment, web browser and a mostly-M$-compatible office suite. I have used Gnome and OpenOffice at home, and unless there are any significant reasons for doing otherwise, I would plan to do the same here. Any other apps will be added on an as-needed basis.  

   Anything Else:  Is there anything else I'm not thinking about (specific boot managers that work better, etc)??

Feel free to mail me off-list if you would like.  Otherwise I look forward to any suggestions you may have.  As always, advTHANKSance!!

-Lawrence
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